Arlington Voters Embrace Ranked Choice

Arlington, VA — Arlington voters came away from November's election confident in ranked choice voting and largely supportive of keeping it, according to a survey report submitted to the County Board on February 23.

FairVote prepared the report with the Ranked Choice Voting Resource Center and Ranked Choice Virginia, under a grant the County Board awarded ahead of the election for voter education and evaluation. The Nov. 4 election was Arlington's fourth using ranked choice voting (RCV) and its second in a general election for County Board, where Takis Karantonis won re-election.

RCV lets voters rank candidates instead of picking just one. If nobody wins a majority outright, the last-place candidate is eliminated and those ballots shift to voters' next choice — a process that repeats until someone crosses 50%.

SurveyUSA, a nonpartisan firm FiveThirtyEight has rated among the top 15 pollsters in the country, conducted the survey on the County Board's behalf, reaching 584 voters by text message, phone, and an online panel the week after the election. SurveyUSA has also polled other RCV jurisdictions, including New York City, San Francisco, and Maine. Results were weighted to match the demographics of Arlington's 2025 electorate.

More than 70% of voters knew they'd be using RCV before they received their ballots. Once they had them in hand, fully 80% said they were "very confident" marking them, and another 16% were "mostly confident" — just 4% were "not very confident" or didn't understand the ballot-marking process at all. Voters were somewhat less sure how their ballots were counted: 62% said they were "confident" and another 25% "pretty sure," while 13% said they were "not sure" or didn't understand.

Two-thirds of voters said they support using RCV in future County Board elections — 36% "strongly" and 30% "somewhat" — against 25% opposed, for net support of positive 41 percentage points.

The survey also probed a common critique of RCV: that ranking more candidates could hurt a voter's first choice. Roughly 9% of voters cited that concern as a reason they ranked only one candidate — fewer than the 64% who said they simply liked only one candidate, or the 29% who said they didn't know enough about the rest of the field to rank them. Overall, 56% of voters ranked more than one candidate.

Support and understanding weren't uniform. Latino voters were the least likely to have known ahead of time that they'd be using RCV — 45%, compared with more than 70% of voters overall — and, along with voters 65 and older, were among the least certain how ballots were counted, with 23% in each group saying they were unsure or didn't understand. Latino voters registered the lowest net support of any group, at positive 19 points; seniors' net support stood at positive 26 — still positive, but below the countywide positive 41. Younger voters, 18 to 29, had the least confidence marking ballots: 12% said they weren't very confident, compared with just 3% of voters 30 and older. Nationally, age is the strongest predictor of self-reported RCV understanding among voters — more so than race, ethnicity, or socioeconomic status, according to a 2021 review by the think tank New America.

The report's recommendations target those gaps. It calls for earlier, sustained outreach to Latino voters, including Spanish-language materials, pointing to guides developed by groups like Democracy Rising and larger RCV cities such as New York City. It suggests tailoring voter education by age — more hands-on, digital content for younger voters, clearer explanations of vote counting for seniors — building on outreach Arlington's registrar already runs at senior centers. It recommends revisiting ballot instructions and poll worker guidance to head off the misconception that ranking more candidates can backfire. And it raises the idea of a nonpartisan candidate voter guide, an approach California and Washington both require by law for local nonpartisan races.

The report is now before the Arlington County Board.