In the excitement in some quarters over the introduction of “ranked-choice voting” in Virginia – to make its debut not in Fairfax but in the June 20 Arlington County Board Democratic primary – there’s one big, if not necessarily insurmountable, problem looming on the horizon.
To wit: Even under the best of circumstances, the public isn’t likely to know the outcome for at least three, and perhaps as many as seven, days after Election Day.
And given how many people – not necessarily fringe elements, either – are concerned about voting integrity, that type of delay may be a step too far.
The problem lies not with ranked-choice voting itself. It’s combining the new process with allowing mail-in ballots to be accepted as late as the Friday after the election, which will cause the various rounds of ranked-choice voting to have to wait until all the ballots are in hand.
By the evening of Election Night, it might be possible, based on results released then, to divine where the election is headed, results-wise. But assuming multiple rounds are needed for the process to play itself out – and that’s the whole point of the ranked-choice process – the candidates and the public will be in a state of suspended animation until that Friday deadline for mail-in votes arrives. Only then can subsequent rounds of the ranked-choice process be started.
Solution? Take your pick:
• Virginia can continue down the path of ranked-choice voting, but if it does so, will have to return to the long-standing but recently discarded practice of requiring mail-in ballots to be in the hands of election officials by the 7 p.m. deadline on Election Night. That way, the ranked-choice process can play out immediately.
• Alternately, if it’s more important to allow extra days for mail-in ballots to arrive, then we’re not sure ranked-choice voting is a viable option.
You can have one, you can have the other, but you can’t have both.
Most voters in many areas, including Fairfax County, remain largely in the dark about the pluses and the minuses of switching from the traditional winner-take-all process to the ranked-choice alternative. The community needs to get educated on both the good and the bad that might accompany a switch, then offer informed feedback and input to decision-makers.
