Majority Oppose Ranked Choice Voting For Arlington Election: Survey

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“I understood the voting process, but the tabulation process was a mess,” a survey respondent commented.

Another respondent said the use of ranked choice voting in a two-seat race was a bad idea. “There should have been ranked voting in two separate buckets, one for each seat,” the reader said. “As it was, my second place vote was never counted, while those for other candidates who did not win were counted. This was not the place to use this system this way; it should have been used for one seat only.”

Ranked choice voting, as implemented in the primary election, would make more sense when only one seat is open, another respondent said.

“In this election, a voter’s second choice candidate did not receive a voter’s support despite the fact that there were two open seats,” the reader commented. “In some sense, that feels like disenfranchisement because with two open seats, you should get a first place vote for each seat. The county should give more consideration to these concerns if implementing ranked choice voting going forward.”

Arlington’s leaders are expected to decide in July whether to use ranked choice voting again in November. In the June 20 Democratic primary, candidates Maureen Coffey and Susan Cunningham won the nominations for the two seats. They were declared the winners on Saturday, four days after voters went to the polls to rank their top three candidates among six candidates on the Democratic primary ballot for county board.

Technical constraints meant that voters were able to select only their top three choices, not rank all six candidates. “There are only so many choices that can fit on a machine-readable ballot,” county elections chief Gretchen Reinemeyer told the Sun Gazette in January.

A Virginia rule required that Arlington election officials wait until they had received all provisional, drop box, and late-arriving mail-in ballots before the ranked choice tabulation process could begin. Mail-in ballot were due by noon on Friday, June 23.

In the comment section of the Patch survey, a reader stated that when there is more than one seat to fill on the same ballot, “voters cannot vote equally for their two top choices.”

“This will be perceived as a flaw in ranked choice voting, but I still believe it is the better way to move than traditional voting,” the reader said.

Another reader said ranked choice voting “is hands down the best way to select the candidates with the most support.”

The two candidates with the most first place votes should have won the primary election, another reader stated. “If we had done it that way, Natalie Roy, who was my first choice, would have been in second place, followed by Susan [Cunningham] followed by Maureen [Coffey],” the reader said.

One reader expressed confusion with how Coffey was able to win one of the nominations after coming in third after the first-choice votes were counted. “Roy won the initial count, and it was never made clear how Coffey won,” the reader said.

Another reader said the ranked choice voting method “obviously allowed Coffey to be elected with less first and second place votes than Roy.”

“While the second-place votes on the Cunningham ballots have not been officially tabulated, it is obvious that the vast majority of them were for Roy,” the reader said. “Thus, if they were added to Roy’s total, she would’ve had thousands more votes than Coffey. Thus, rank choice allowed for subversion of the will of the voters that Roy and Cunningham be the two nominees (as an obvious rebuke to Missing Middle).”

A survey respondent said they found it “deeply unsettling” that 25 percent of voters — the amount of first-place votes that Susan Cunningham received — did not have their second or third votes counted.

“Before this vote there seemed to be adequate information on how to cast your vote in RCV but not in how they would be counted,” the person said. “If the goal of implementing RCV was to be more fair and make things more simple, this process can only be considered a fail. … All of that said, I am not dissatisfied with the outcome, only with the extremely confusing process that ended up not counting all the votes.”

Cunningham and Roy opposed the Missing Middle Housing plan approved by the Arlington County Board in March, a major topic of discussion during the Democratic primary, while Coffey and the other three candidates in the primary election supported the county board’s adoption of the Missing Middle plan.

The six candidates ran to fill the seats currently held by Board Member Katie Cristol and Board Chairman Christian Dorsey, who each announced in 2022 that they would not run for re-election to a third term.

In the Patch survey, respondents were asked which candidate they chose as their first choice.

Among the 250 survey participants, 95 respondents, or 38 percent, said Roy received their first-choice vote, the highest percentage of the six candidates in the race. Seventy-nine, or 31.5 percent, said Cunningham was their first choice vote. Thirty-two readers, or 12.8 percent of survey participants, said Coffey was their first choice, while 30, or 12 percent of respondents, said JD Spain was their first choice.

In the survey, 3.6 percent of respondents said Tony Weaver was their first choice, while 2 percent said Jonathan Dromgoole was their first choice.

Arlington’s Office of Voter Registration & Elections said it conducted extensive outreach to help candidates and voters understand the new voting method prior to the start of early voting in the Democratic primary.

After Coffey and Cunningham were declared the unofficial winners last Friday, Arlington County Board member Takis Karantonis told Patch that ranked choice voting is a big change and that the county needs to be careful about getting the electorate acquainted with the new voting system.

“I am under no illusions that one time is enough for the broader electorate to understand it,” he said.

The tabulation of votes in the Democratic primary process used an open-source software that takes seconds to run the calculation of votes from the different rounds, where candidates are eliminated from contention, DCist reported.

The RCV Resource Center, a nonprofit group that teaches the public about ranked choice voting and provides consulting services to localities, was involved in the distribution of the software to the Arlington registrar’s office, according to the DCist report.

In the Patch survey, more than 62 percent of respondents said they understood the basics, but not the details, of the tabulation process used in counting the top three ranked candidates in the Democratic primary. Nearly 21 percent of respondents said they were “experts” in how the votes were tabulated in the ranked choice voting primary, while nearly 17 percent said they were “totally confused” by the counting process.

“Ranked choice voting is confusing. Simplify, simplify!” a reader said.

Another reader noted they had a problem with the system allowing voters to rank only the top three choices. “It disenfranchised us and violated the principles of ranked choice voting,” the reader said. “The county should have waited until the machines could handle all choices. Will we be allowed to rank all four candidates in November?”

“While I was initially supportive of the concept, in practice I found the vote tabulation round process completely confusing and obtuse,” another reader said. “My understanding is that there are other ranked models used elsewhere that are simpler, more transparent and perhaps fairer to the leading candidates. The Arlington experiment should be objectively analyzed and improved before using again.”

Another person who responded to the survey said that “civic-minded people understood it, and they probably overlap with primary election voters.”

But the person said they are not sure if ranked choice voting is ready for November’s general election. “Non-English speakers and perhaps others may find it confusing without better explanations,” the person said. “Most people did not foresee the consequences and perhaps would have voted differently (no second or third choices) if they had assessed exactly how votes would be allocated and how you could lose the popular vote and still gain a seat.”

Another respondent said they thought they understood the ranked choice voting process better than they actually did.

“I was confused how Roy did not move forward to second place when she had the second most votes, so guessing I do not understand the tabulation process, which seems more complicated than most of us realized and easily screwed up?” the respondent explained. “I am not 100 percent sold on it after using and reading the tabulation process. I feel it’s more like the electoral college than the candidate(s) with the most votes winning. It feels a little scary for the primary in November.”

The Arlington County Board is currently collecting its own feedback from voters on their views of the use of ranked choice voting in the primary. The county’s feedback form will close on July 5.

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