Block Voting in Charlottesville

In 2025, Charlottesville is holding its first ranked choice election — the most significant change to the city's electoral system in more than a century. 

Some of the changes are obvious. Ranked choice ballots let voters share how they feel about all the candidates, allowing residents to express more nuanced views.

But ranked choice voting doesn't just change how we fill out our ballots — it changes who can run, who can win, and who can really have a voice in city government. This piece is the first in a series exploring the historic roots of Charlottesville's old block voting system, used in cities across the country to suppress diversity in local leadership. 

For decades, civil rights advocates in Charlottesville have tried to reform the block vote and secure fair representation for city residents. The modern ranked choice movement builds on their work, offering a new path to the inclusive elections they have long fought to achieve.

How Block Voting Works

The basic structure of Charlottesville's City Council has been stable for decades. The Council has five members, and each member is elected to a four-year term. The terms are staggered in two groups, with two seats elected alongside the governor, as in 2025, and three seats elected in state senate years. All of the seats are elected "at-large" so that each member represents the whole city.

Prior to this year, Charlottesville chose City Council members using a block voting system, in which each voter could support as many candidates as there were seats up for election. In 2023, for example, when there were three open seats, voters could support up to three candidates, and the three people with the most votes won.

Though block voting sounds simple, it also quietly gives some voters all the power. If voters in the largest demographic or political group tend to support the same candidates, that group (or "block") will pick all three winners, leaving other parts of the community with no representation at all. 

The winner-take-all effects of block voting are easy to see in recent partisan elections near Charlottesville. In Harrisonburg's last election, Democrats were 59% of the Congressional vote, but Democratic candidates won all three city council seats because most Democratic voters supported the same three candidates. Republican and independent voters won no seats — despite being more than 40% of the voters and concentrating all their support behind one candidate. 

In Lynchburg, the partisan tables are turned. Republicans are typically a slim majority of Lynchburg voters — less than 55% in Congressional races — but Republican candidates won all the at-large seats on city council in their last election. Democrats and independents were nearly half the voters, but they won no seats because no one candidate could match the Republican block. In both cities, block voting allowed a modest majority of voters to capture all the seats in an election.

While partisan examples make winner-take-all patterns easy to see, voting blocks can form around other features that divide the electorate – like race, age, wealth, and region – even in primary elections for a single party. If white residents are the largest voting block, racial minorities tend to be underrepresented among the winning candidates – even relative to their share of the voters. If most voters are homeowners, then renters tend to be underrepresented, too. Over time, as minority voters realize the system is stacked against them, they may be less likely to vote in elections at all, depressing voter turnout and creating the illusion of consensus among the voters who remain engaged. In winner-take-all elections, the losing team has little incentive to play the game at all.

But Charlottesville's winner-take-all system wasn't inevitable — it was engineered. Learn why block voting spread across Virginia and the country in the second installment of this series.