It wasn’t the whiff of waffles you might have caught lingering in the air. But perhaps it was waffling.
Intentionally or not, Arlington County Board members in a Jan. 2 confab with the Arlington County Civic Federation left some ambiguity whether they planned to enact ranked-choice voting for the 2024 general election.
“It hasn’t been decided yet,” County Board Chairman Libby Garvey said in response to a federation question, although she said upcoming meetings slated for Jan. 20 and 23 are “when I expect we’re likely to take it up.”
In December, County Board members voted unanimously to impose the ranked-choice method for all future County Board primary elections. But board members did not extend the change to general elections, saying the wording of the legal advertisement for that meeting did not allow them to do so.
Not everybody was convinced by that rationale. Mike Cantwell, who is active in the ranked-choice-voting movement, said County Board members could have extended the change to general elections without running afoul of legal-advertising requirements.
“You literally just have to strike one word [in the ordinance] – you strike the word ‘primary,’” he said at the Jan. 2 give-and-take between the County Board and Civic Federation delegates.
Although advocates of ranked-choice voting might argue otherwise, moving the primary to a ranked-choice format in 2023 proved confusing to many voters and left some with the distinct feeling that it had been put in place by the county’s Democratic establishment specifically to eliminate one candidate from viability. With that mission accomplished, critics say, County Board members then reverted to the winner-take-all format for the general election so as to not imperil the two Democrats running in the four-candidate field.
Those two Democrats – Maureen Coffey and Susan Cunningham – now sit on the County Board dais and will cast votes going forward. Their lame-duck predecessors, Christian Dorsey and appointee Tannia Talento, were among those voting in December to implement ranked-choice voting for future County Board primaries.
Legislation enacted several years ago by the General Assembly, allowing localities to use instant-runoff/ranked-choice voting for governing-body elections, left the decision-making on the issue to the elected bodies themselves, rather than requiring (or even allowing) a voter referendum on the issue.
This decision on the voting method for the primary election likely only will impact Democrats, as Republicans typically use other methods to select their nominees.
