Charlottesville is gearing up for its first election using ranked choice voting
Charlottesville’s experiment with proportional ranked-choice voting is swiftly approaching, with the Democratic primary for City Council set for June 17. The new (to Charlottesville at least) voting system was adopted on a trial basis in a 4-1 split vote by City Council on September 3, 2024.
In the months leading up to the primary, city leaders and local organizers are working to educate voters on proportional ranked-choice voting and the history of voting systems in Charlottesville. The city’s current system for local elections—plurality block voting—may seem like the most obvious choice, but its history is rooted in Jim Crow-era minority voter suppression.
“In plurality block voting, the biggest group wins. And they don’t just win some [seats], they win everything,” says former delegate Sally Hudson, founder of Ranked Choice Virginia. “Plurality block voting was adopted in Charlottesville in 1923, which is the height of the Jim Crow era for this region. … old Daily Progress articles and old reports by the UVA Institute of Government pretty openly acknowledge that the motivation for adopting block voting at the time was because it reduced the influence of working-class, ethnic neighborhoods, aka Black, on City Council.”
Prior to the introduction of plurality block voting, Charlottesville utilized a ward system for elections, in which each neighborhood elected a representative. In an effort to increase Black representation on City Council, the Charlottesville NAACP lobbied for the reintroduction of ward elections in the 1970s, something that ultimately failed, despite passing an initial referendum vote.
https://c-ville.com/charlottesville-is-gearing-up-for-its-first-election-using-ranked-choice-voting/