Reform Fatigue in Charlottesville

Though Charlottesville City Council had legal authority to adopt a ward plan with or without voter support, it chose to maintain the block voting system after the failed 1982 referendum. That defeat would haunt election reform efforts in the city for decades. More than twenty years later, when reform questions resurfaced, the same problems persisted but residents doubted that progress was possible.

By the early 2000s, the city's geographic rifts in representation had grown even more stark. In the prior four decades, 31 councilors were elected from just four north side precincts: Carver, Recreation, Walker, and Venable. In the same period, only one councilor was elected from Tonsler, two from Alumni Hall, and three from Jefferson Park. Worst of all, not a single first-time candidate was elected from the Clark precinct anchored in the Belmont neighborhood. (The only councilor to live in Clark was first elected while living in Walker and later moved to Clark and won re-election.)

In 2004, City Council convened a Task Force to study the City's election laws and revisit potential reforms, but the Task Force wrestled with the same tensions that stalled the 1980s ward campaign. The committee worried that ward councilors would focus narrowly on their own neighborhoods rather than taking a citywide view. They feared that drawing a single majority-Black ward would create "the one (and only) avenue for African-American opportunity," limiting representation for Black candidates and voters who lived in other districts. And they worried that any wards they drew would eventually morph into gerrymandered districts over time. Facing these familiar tradeoffs, the Task Force declined to recommend any specific reforms, noting that state law gave cities few alternatives to wards and block voting. The committee's findings reflected broader establishment resistance to reform. As former mayors Frank Buck and David Toscano argued in a Daily Progress editorial, "If it ain't broke, don't fix it."

The reform fatigue was also evident at Task Force hearings, which were poorly attended despite widespread publicity, especially in the neighborhoods that had long been unrepresented on Council. The Task Force’s final report concluded that "low turn-out of African-Americans at the hearings could be attributed to the sentiment that 'we've tried to change the system so many times; we've just grown tired of trying.'" Twenty-five years after the NAACP's first ward campaign, the residents who had fought hardest for electoral reform had grown weary of repeated failures. The ward system still lacked broad support in Charlottesville, and Virginia law left cities with few other options. 

But a new path emerged in 2020, when the General Assembly finally loosened Virginia's restrictive election laws. Learn how Virginia's new ranked choice voting option can address the problems that stalled past reform efforts in the final chapter of this series.