Editor’s Note: Whatcom Watch has entered a cooperative agreement with Salish Current. When possible, we will share each other’s content. Salish Current, an online-only news organization, covers the North Sound area and Whatcom Watch mainly covers Whatcom County issues. Visit https://salish-current.org.
by Matt Benoit
Candidates elected to the Whatcom County Charter Review Commission could give voters a chance for a different election format with ranked choice voting.
As ballots were mailed out for this year’s November election, voters again found themselves picking between the results of August’s top-two primary format.
Since 2009, Washington has utilized a primary system in which the two candidates with the most votes, regardless of party, advance to the general election.
But some voters — and some candidates running to be part of the 15-person Whatcom County Charter Review Commission — have discussed what’s known as “ranked choice voting,” or RCV. Also known as “instant-runoff voting,” a voter ranks the candidates on the ballot in the order of whom they’d most prefer to win.
If any candidate receives more than 50 percent of all voters’ first choices, they automatically win. But if that doesn’t happen, voters’ other choices come into play. Candidates with the fewest first choice votes are eliminated, with those votes going to whomever those voters selected as their second choice; the process continues until a candidate finally receives a majority of votes.
The candidates chosen this November to represent the Whatcom County Charter Review Commission — convened every 10 years to review the county’s official set of laws — will have the power to bring a future vote on RCV to Whatcom County citizens, potentially providing a different method of deciding county elections.
Who Uses RCV?
The use of ranked choice voting in Washington — and the rest of the United States — is currently sparse.
As of February 2024, just 50 jurisdictions across the country utilize the format for all voters in public elections, according to Fairvote.org, a nonpartisan organization that promotes RCV. Currently, only Alaska and Maine use it statewide: the former for federal and state general elections, the latter for all federal elections and state primaries. Alaskan voters will consider a repeal measure of the process in November.
While no federal use of RCV currently exists beyond those two jurisdictions, a Ranked Choice Voting Act — reintroduced to Congress in September — would require an RCV format for all nationwide congressional primary and general elections beginning in 2028.
Currently, the most populated jurisdiction to use RCV is New York City, which relies on the format for primary elections including its mayoral race. In the Pacific Northwest, only a handful of California and Oregon cities use the format for local races, but Portland used RCV in November (see article on facing page).
Multnomah County, Oregon — where much of the Portland metropolitan area lies — will follow in 2026, while Seattle, whose voters adopted it in 2022 for primary elections, won’t utilize RCV until 2027. Among the only other Washington municipalities to seriously consider it is Vancouver, which has had RCV as an unused option in its city charter since 1999.
Most recently and locally, a 2022 San Juan County campaign raised about $31,000 towards promoting RCV there, according to the Public Disclosure Commission. Voters rejected the RCV amendment 54.7 to 45.3 percent.
A similar vote took place in Clark County that year, and was rejected by an even wider margin.
Many U.S. universities, though, use RCV for student elections, including the University of Washington and Western Washington University. Western adopted the policy in 2012, using it to elect their student senate vice chair and parliamentarian.
Outside the United States, several countries make use of RCV, including Ireland, New Zealand, Scotland and India. Most notable, though, is Australia, which uses RCV for electing its House of Representatives and in nearly all state and local government elections.
On the Minds of Locals
Kit Muehlman, a Bellingham yoga and meditation teacher, became an advocate for RCV in 2017 after her brother told her about it.
Muehlman, who is also a volunteer for Bellingham’s League of Women Voters chapter and Fairvote’s Washington chapter, said one thing in particular made her want to see the format be used more often.
“I saw how that could bring the political temperature down some,” she said. “Instead of black and white, we could have shades of gray. And elections would be more about issues than negative campaigning.”
Muehlman attended two voter forums this summer related to the Whatcom County Charter Review Commission: one put on by the South Fork Valley Community Association (SFVCA) at Mount Baker Senior High School in July, and another in August held at the Rome Grange.
RCV came up among candidates both times.
Jeff Margolis, a Van Zandt resident who has been politically active locally for over 50 years and emceed the July event as SFVCA chair, said RCV was also among the top seven topics on the minds of both candidates and voters.
Margolis, who cautioned that he’s neither an authority nor an advocate on the format, expressed the opinion that RCV might be okay in some elections but potentially problematic in others.
In the charter review commission race in District 3, for instance, 11 candidates originally ran for the district’s three seats. Several, Margolis noted, have already dropped out. Asking voters to rank all 11 candidates could be unnecessarily time-consuming and confusing to voters, Margolis said, and quite possibly headache-inducing.
“I did my Ph.D. work in political science,” he said. “[But] I still don’t feel that I’m one to be a referee in this fight.”
Potential Concerns
Although she doesn’t share Margolis’s view, Muehlman has also heard criticism that RCV may be too complicated for some voters, putting additional informational burden on them at a time when many are already too busy or distracted to be properly informed about what’s on their ballot.
A mock-up illustrates one version of how a ranked choice ballot might look.
edited screen shot courtesy of Salish Current
That could lead to issues that Todd Donovan, WWU political science professor and current Whatcom County councilmember, has studied in recent years.
Depending on how a RCV ballot is configured and scanned, a voter could accidentally vote for the same candidate twice if they’re not careful, Donovan said, potentially invalidating their ballot.
RCV ballots can be organized several different ways, including asking a voter to put their number preference in a box next to a candidate’s name. Many RCV ballots have a grid format, where voters read two columns — one with candidate names and the other with “first choice” and so on — and fill in bubbles.
Another issue arises when voters don’t rank all the candidates, leading to what’s called “ballot exhaustion.” This means their votes wouldn’t transfer to subsequent rounds of voting if their first choice did not advance, Donovan said. This could result in situations where a candidate gets 50 percent of remaining votes, but not an actual majority of all votes cast, he added.
In NYC’s last mayoral primary, for instance, eventual winner Eric Adams said he did not like the RCV format, fearing it would disenfranchise his base of African-American voters, Donovan said.
“His voters were least likely to mark a second or a third preference,” he said. “Adams ends up winning, but if he’d gotten knocked out in round two, [and] all of his supporters didn’t mark a second preference, their ballots are exhausted.”
While political science-based surveys indicate a high rate of understanding RCV ballot instructions across all racial and ethnic voter groups, Donovan said, those rates can vary significantly in different places among communities of color.
Many state and local auditors, Donovan added, also worry about the difficulty in implementing a RCV method of vote-gathering. Vendors must have equipment capable of handling the rankings, and ballots must be properly designed to minimize confusion. RCV can also change the size or even number of ballots a voter receives.
“Our charter would only apply [RCV] to county races, but the amount of real estate on the ballot it takes to put the space for the rankings is going to potentially blow up the size of the ballot,” Donovan said. “Do you make a separate ballot just for the ranked choice voting?”
Potential Benefits
Even with those concerns, however, Donovan said there are still numerous arguments in favor of RCV formats.
Chief among them: the possibility of creating a more civil, less toxic campaign atmosphere.
“When you’re in a zero-sum contest — you’re going to win or you’re going to lose — there’s no reason to make any appeals to your opponents,” he said. “But if you make it a preferential ranking thing, then we expect people to be making appeals for second preferences or third preferences. So you can’t trash your opponent totally, if you’re expecting their supporters to rank you second or third.”
The format also increases the possibility that voters may have less fear about “wasting their vote,” as even if their first choice is eliminated, a second choice vote still transfers to the next voting round. RCV in Australia, Donovan added, shows a potential benefit for smaller political parties to have a greater effect on political power when their supporters’ votes transfer support.
“Even though you’re not winning seats, it gives your party [the ability to] demonstrate the leverage and the influence that you have,” he said.
Greater adoption of the format in the United States could result in future elections where non-Democrat or non- Republican candidates have opportunities to be better heard, Donovan concluded. Although there is not yet strong empirical evidence to support it, Donovan said it’s also possible RCV may increase voter turnout and more moderate outcomes among winners.
When Votes Are Counted
A decade ago, Donovan was on the county’s charter review commission, and recalled a 6–7–1 vote — just one vote shy of generating a ballot measure — for a preferential voting format similar to RCV.
He said he believes the chance that the next commission might provide county voters a chance to shake up local elections is definitely possible — far more possible, he added, than the county council finding the unanimous 7–0 vote needed to change how county council members are elected.
For advocates like Muehlman, only time will tell if future choices are ranked.
“Whatcom County could lead the state,” she said of a change. “Ranked choice voting gives me hope that politics could be more functional and more cooperative.”
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Matt Benoit is Bellingham-born and raised. He’s written for The Bellingham Herald, Tri-City Herald, Pacific Northwest Inlander, Discover Magazine.com and WhatcomTalk.com, among others. He holds a bachelor’s degree in journalism and media production from Washington State University. Read more of his work at matthewcbenoit.com.
