Charlottesville City Council primary city's first to use ranked choice voting [View all]
In Tuesday’s City Council primary, Charlottesville is about to become the second locality in Virginia — after Arlington County — to use ranked choice voting, after a century of using a winner-take-all block system.
In block voting, voters choose as many candidates as there are open seats for a certain office. With ranked choice voting, voters don’t just select their favorite candidates; instead, they rank as many of the candidates as they would like, in order of their preference.
In ranked choice elections with more than one winner, like the Charlottesville City Council race, when a candidate gets more votes than they need to win, voter’s choices are counted towards their next preference.
Former Charlottesville Del. Sally Hudson, now executive director of Ranked Choice Virginia and fellow at the University of Virginia’s Karsh Institute of Democracy, said the change creates a system that “respects diversity by design.”
https://www.vpm.org/elections/2025-06-16/charlottesville-council-primary-ranked-choice-sally-hudson-uva-karsh
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