A few comments regarding Ranked Choice Voting:

1 – Previous elections in other states revealed high percentages of spoiled ballots due to lack of understanding by voters how to properly mark ranked-choice ballots.

2 – Currently, Virginia voting tabulators are not programmed to accept and properly count ranked-choice ballots. Virginia voting tabulator vendors have recently been required to increase security measures and pass multiple equipment tests, which have been quite costly. Switching to ranked-choice voting for some elections (primaries) would demand vendors to re-program tabulators and obtain re-certification for tabulators again.

3 – US Supreme Court ruling in Reynolds v Simms in 1964 stated “one man, one vote” however ranked-choice in essence is allowing a voter to vote for numerous candidates in each race.

4 – Ranked-choice may discourage voters from participating. For instance, if there are four candidates running and voter likes one candidate only, ranked-choice basically forces the voter to rank the other three candidates in order to be certain his/her vote is counted in the final total. If the voter’s choice loses in the first round and he/she did not mark choices two, three and four, it’s as if he or she never voted.

5 – How will the ranked-choice votes be tabulated? By precinct or by district? What about early voting and vote by mail ballots? Will they be tabulated separately or added to the corresponding precinct or district? General Registrars and staff are already working long hours during the election cycle; however, this would be an additional burden for them to tally ballot numbers and rankings accurately.

6 – What about provisional ballots? And emailed ballots which cannot be fed into tabulator? That would require all offices the ability to hand-tally the ranked-choice votes. Would they be added to the corresponding precinct or district total? Official results would be delayed for many days.

7 – If a complete hand-recount were called, tabulating the votes would be extremely taxing, difficult, time consuming and expensive.

8 – Educating voter registration staff and officers of election would take time. Having them uniformly educating voters at the polls or at an early voting site (particularly during the first one or two elections) would be a challenge and could cause upset voters and workers as well as long lines. A crash-course in educating voters could cause many voters to cry “disenfranchisement” due to not listening to instructions, mismarking ballot, becoming overwhelmed and not understanding ranked-choice voting.

9 – For many November elections, we would have local candidates with ranked-choice voting available and Congressional or state-wide candidates without ranked-choice voting. That would be confusing to many.

10 – At a time when much of the public (both Democratic and Republican) are concerned about votes being tallied correctly or not disenfranchising voters, it does not seem an appropriate time to test/implement a completely new system of tabulating votes.

11 – Prior to each election, all voting tabulators must pass L&A testing. In order to test all of the possible scenarios well would require MANY additional test ballots.

12 – The above concerns are not an exhaustive list.