On Saturday, May 7, Republican voters in Virginia’s 11th Congressional District used ranked choice voting (RCV) to nominate Jim Myles as their 2022 candidate for U.S. House. This is the first use of RCV to nominate a congressional candidate in Virginia’s 11th, which comprises most of Fairfax County, the City of Fairfax, and part of Prince William County.

On Saturday, May 7, Republican voters in Virginia’s 11th Congressional District used ranked choice voting (RCV) to nominate Jim Myles as their 2022 candidate for U.S. House. This is the first use of RCV to nominate a congressional candidate in Virginia’s 11th, which comprises most of Fairfax County, the City of Fairfax, and part of Prince William County.

Between partisan gerrymandering and geographical sorting, more and more congressional districts are safely red or blue. This means that in a red district, whoever wins the Republican primary will win the general election with ease. The same can be said for the winner of the Democratic primary in a blue district.

This year, FairVote’s Rob Richie, Ben Oestericher, Deb Otis, and Jeremy Seitz-Brown wrote a 10-page article for Politics and Governance about how the use of ranked choice voting (RCV) ballots in presidential primaries both preserves the right of voters to elect their party’s nominee while encouraging candidates to build a majority coalition within their party and reflect its values in order to secure the nomination.

As the last few presidential primary election cycles have shown, the selection of a major party’s nominee has a profound impact on the American political ecosystem. Recent primary cycles have seen increasingly crowded fields

Ranked choice voting is garnering more allies in Congress. The Election Security Act retains a provision from H.R. 1 that helps advance the movement for ranked choice voting.

Instead of choosing just one candidate, why not allow voters to rank all the contestants in order of preference? Ranked choice voting would not only eliminate the spoiler effect, but it would reduce strategic voting and jumpstart America’s transition away from the two-party system.

Competition is the missing ingredient from American primary elections.

Election reform moved forward this cycle, but there is more work to be done.

A plethora of disturbingly low plurality wins in the 2018 primaries exemplify the need for ranked choice voting.