District voters will decide in November whether D.C. government officials will implement ranked-choice voting and open primaries in future city elections after the D.C. Board of Elections added the question to the ballot earlier this month. 

Ballot Initiative 83 will jointly ask voters whether to open up D.C.’s primary elections to registered independents, who currently can’t participate, and whether to adopt ranked-choice voting — a system that would allow voters in city elections to rank up to five candidates and require that the winner receive at least 50 percent of the votes. Grassroots organizations in D.C. have pushed for the city to adopt ranked-choice voting for nearly half a decade, and before the D.C. Board of Elections could certify the initiative on Aug. 2, organizers obtained over 27,000 verified signatures from D.C. residents in support, more than what was required.

As D.C. community members debate whether ranked-choice voting would promote democracy or confuse voters, a Ward 2 governing body already tested and approved the election system in November 2023. 

The Foggy Bottom and West End Advisory Neighborhood Commission employed a ranked-choice voting system when selecting community representatives for a committee overseeing the opening of a homeless shelter near campus — which ANC commissioners have said was likely the first ranked-choice vote in a D.C. government election. Jim Malec, the ANC’s chair at the time, said after the governing body failed to elect members with a traditional voting model in a July meeting plagued by disagreements over the meeting’s procedures, the ANC had to “regroup” and agree on a new system to nominate and elect appointees. 

“I didn’t want to just repeat the same scenario from that first meeting,” Malec said. “ I had to think through another way to do this, and ranked choice seemed like a logical way forward, because it would not prioritize any commissioners’ nominees over other commissioners’ nominees.”

Although Malec said the commissioners all agreed to use a traditional model and “should have” been able to elect representatives in July, commissioners criticized each other and received backlash from community members for not selecting their preferred candidates, which forced the group to adjourn the meeting without completing the election. 

Malec said he attributes the November election’s success to the body’s implementation of ranked-choice voting, as it was impossible for commissioners or community members to impinge or criticize the election’s fairness since the voting system ensured that those elected received broad support from commissioners. 

Malec added that the ANC found ranked-choice voting to be an effective strategy for reducing “wasted” votes, or votes for a candidate who wouldn’t win, since commissioners’ votes still contributed to electing their second or third choices. He said he supports the ranked-choice voting ballot initiative as it would ensure votes aren’t wasted at a city-wide level and that candidates elected to the D.C. Council receive a majority of votes. 

Councilmembers have previously secured election victories with fewer than 30 percent of the vote. Ward 2 Councilmember Brooke Pinto, who represents residents living on GW’s Foggy Bottom Campus, won the 2020 Democratic primary with 28.4 percent of the votes in a three-way race. 

After the November election’s successful use of ranked-choice voting, the ANC used the voting system again in April to select members for its bylaws review committee. 

“It was clean, efficient, effective and fair, and that’s why we did it,” Malec said about ranked-choice voting. “I would do it again if I was still the chair and I had a similar situation.”

ANC Chair Trupti Patel, the ANC’s vice chair in 2023, said she found the ranked-choice election “a lot more fair” because commissioners reached a plurality when electing appointees. 

Patel said she supports adopting Initiative 83 because Democratic primaries for District government seats historically have predicted the general election winner, given that D.C. is an overwhelmingly Democratic city. In Ward 2, she said councilmembers have won primary elections with votes from less than 10 percent of Ward 2 residents. 

Pinto won the 2022 Democratic primary with about 7,000 votes and the general election with roughly 20,000. Pinto represents more than 77,000 Ward 2 residents. 

“With ranked-choice voting, I think it’s the residents that win,” Patel said. “Because candidates are going to be forced to really talk to everyone that they encounter about their platform, their ideas and their vision. I think this is going to increase voter engagement.”

Brianna McGowan, a steering committee member of the grassroots organization DC for Democracy, said local groups began pushing the D.C. Council to pass legislation to switch election systems in 2019. The coalition of organizations switched to pursuing a ballot initiative in 2021, she said, since it would show elected officials that there is broad support for ranked-choice voting by requiring a majority of D.C. voters to approve it in November. 

“A ballot initiative just feels more empowering for people to choose and actively be convinced to it,” McGowan said. “The ballot initiative path felt like a stronger path to victory for ranked-choice voting in D.C.”

After receiving ballot certification, the initiative supporters will next share information on ranked-choice voting with local leaders, like ANC commissioners, who can help them engage with and educate voters on how ranked-choice voting works and garner support ahead of the November election, she said.

Opponents to ranked-choice voting, including D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser, say ranked-choice voting would violate the District’s Home Rule Charter — a 1973 Congressional act allowing D.C. a level of self-governing power. The D.C. Democratic Party filed a lawsuit in Aug. 2023 to thwart the ballot initiative arguing that it would violate the Home Rule Charter’s requirement that the mayor, D.C. Council and Attorney General be elected on a partisan basis. 

If voters approve the ballot initiative, before the new elections system can be implemented the D.C. Council must appropriate funds for the switch and Bowser must sign it into law. Then, the United States Congress has 30 days to either overturn the law or let it pass. 

Andrea Benjamin, an associate professor of African and African American studies at the University of Oklahoma who studies race and voting behavior, said ranked-choice voting could be a “step in the right direction” to increase candidate quality and address lower voter turnout and citizens feeling that their votes don’t matter. She cited a jump in voter turnout in New York City’s first ranked-choice mayoral election in 2021 but said it’s too early to tell whether the rise in turnout will sustain or whether it was due to excitement surrounding the first ranked-choice election.

More than 62 election jurisdictions nationally have adopted ranked-choice voting, including San Francisco and Minneapolis. 

“You just have to be really careful, because in your attempt to make voting easier, in the sense of, we don’t have to come back for a runoff, you don’t want to make it so that people make mistakes on their ballots and then their vote doesn’t count,” Benjamin said.