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.”
Charlottesville, which used to vote by wards, adopted block voting in 1923 — at the height of the Jim Crow era.
Hudson said the system was designed to allow more affluent white voters to maintain dominance over the City Council instead of empowering a diverse city that represents all its people.
She stressed that block voting wasn’t the natural state of affairs in the city: “It was adopted on purpose to suppress diversity in our city government, and now, after a century of reform efforts, we're finally moving toward a system where we're embracing diversity by design.”
Hudson referenced a 2004 reportthat reviewed the last 50 years of Charlottesville City Council representation.
“City council was very dominated by white people coming from the more affluent neighborhoods, and the south side of the city didn't really have a voice on council,” she said.
In 1979, the local NAACP lobbied the all-white city council for reform. In 1981, the council held a referendum on a new ward voting plan. The referendum passed with 52% of the vote, but councilors rejected the results, citing close margins.
When the proposal was put up for a vote again in 1982, 58% voted against it. Haunted by that 1982 defeat, reform efforts died down.
In 2020, the General Assembly passed legislation — authored by Hudson — that loosened Virginia’s election laws. Last year, City Council passed an ordinance that authorized the city to conduct its first ranked choice vote during 2025’s council primary.
Hudson said that people she’s spoken with about the change are often relieved.
“If there's someone you really like, but you give a second or a third vote to one of the other candidates, you're supporting one of their opponents, and so you could actually make it harder to get your favorite elected, and rank choice gets rid of that problem,” she said.
Voters won’t use this system in the November general election. Virginia law limits ranked choice voting to city council and board of supervisors elections, and without Republican opposition on the ballot in November, Tuesday’s primary will serve as the de facto election.
