Changes to Arlington voting equipment could increase the number of candidates voters are able to rank.
Arlington voters are currently able to rank only three candidates when participating in ranked-choice voting. However, planned upgrades to voting systems would raise that number to at least five.
At a meeting of the Arlington Electoral Board last week, Director of Elections Gretchen Reinemeyer said the search for more robust hardware and software to handle future elections has begun.
“We will be moving forward with either an upgrade [to current equipment] or a replacement,” she said.
The state government has certified only a handful of vendors to provide voting equipment in the commonwealth. Arlington election officials likely will huddle with many or all of them during the Virginia Electoral Board Association’s annual meeting in March.
“The options are very limited,” Reinemeyer said. “Our shopping mall has five stores in it.”
It appears logistically impossible for the new equipment to be in place for the June primary, as early voting starts May 3. It might also be unnecessary, as it’s likely the Democratic primary will see three or fewer Board candidates.
But having a system purchased and ready to go for the general election could be feasible, and County Board members have set aside funding for it, Reinemeyer said.
Arlington’s current voting system dates to 2015. County election officials hope the next system has a similar usable lifespan.
But ever-changing requirements related to voting systems mean some localities could purchase new systems, only to see them ruled out of compliance and be faced with another costly replacement.
Under ranked-choice voting, low-scoring candidates are eliminated from contention and their support is reallocated as directed by voters until a single candidate reaches a majority of votes cast.
Equipment limitations came into play in the November general election, when voters had four County Board candidates to choose from. Having had the ability to rank all four candidates would not have altered the election’s outcome, however, as Democrat JD Spain Sr. won about 58% of first-round votes, meaning the ranked-choice process did not need to play out.
Current state law limits ranked-choice voting to a locality’s governing board. Arlington was the first jurisdiction in Virginia to move away from winner-take-all to the RCV format, with several others expected to follow this year.
The lone Board seat on the ballot in 2025 currently is held by Takis Karantonis, who recently announced plans to seek re-election.
Early Voting Edges Out In-Person in 2024: In what likely will be the norm going forward, early voting was the preferred method of casting ballots in Arlington’s 2024 general election.
Sixty percent of the electorate cast a ballot in advance of Election Day, with 44% of voting taking place at early-voting sites or through dropboxes, and another 16% by mail.
The remaining 40% of votes were cast at precincts on Election Day, Reinemeyer said.
“I do think the numbers will hold” in future elections, she said in presenting a 2024 election wrapup.
The percentage of those voting early in 2024 was well down from the 83% doing so in 2020, but that election was conducted in the midst of Covid.
The 2024 percentage was well above those of 2012 (25%) and 2016 (31%), when Virginia had more restrictive rules on who could vote early.
A total of 130,522 Arlington voters cast ballots in the 2024 election, a 77% turnout.
Republicans Flip Leadership Posts on Electoral Board: Republican Dominick Schirripa has been selected to chair the Arlington Electoral Board for 2024, with Republican Richard Samp to serve as vice chair and Democrat Kim Phillip as secretary.
The three board members divided the positions among themselves at the body’s meeting last week.
Phillip already had been serving as secretary, arguably the position with the most responsibility. The two Republicans flipped posts, with Samp previously serving as chair and Schirripa as vice chair.
Virginia’s 130-plus local electoral boards each contain three members, with two representing the party currently occupying the governorship and the third occupied by the out-of-power party.
Under state law, the chair and secretary of the body need to be of different political parties.
