Having offered to explain ranked-choice voting at a meeting in Ward 7 late last month, Patricia Stamper decided to use an example she thought her audience could quickly relate to.
“I asked, ‘What’s your favorite go-go band?’ Everyone started naming them. I said, ‘OK, so what’s your top three? Your top five?’ They gave them to me, and I said, ‘That’s ranked-choice voting,’” she recalls.
But Stamper also recognizes that the change in how votes are cast and counted in D.C. may be confusing, and that could prompt criticism that voters – especially minority voters – are being disenfranchised.
“I see the gravity of the moment. We need to educate people, or if not we’ll be SOL,” she says.
That official task is now in the hands of the D.C. Board of Elections, which says it plans to launch a citywide public education campaign early next year. But both critics and proponents of ranked-choice voting worry about whether the board is up to the task; the former say it should be delayed until 2028, while the latter are taking it upon themselves to help spread the word.
Even the board’s leadership has sounded somewhat resigned to the task, saying that it could use more money and wouldn’t mind having more time.
“We have been asked to do the impossible in the past. This is not the first time we have been set up for failure. And we figure it out,” said Monica Evans, the director of the elections board, during a D.C. Council hearing in late November. “I’m not going to say it’s going to be pretty or perfect… but [ranked-choice voting] can happen.”
But first, a brief primer on ranked-choice voting
The basics are about as simple as Stamper explained: In any race with three or more candidates, you’re allowed to rank up to five candidates in order of your preference. (So if there are seven candidates in a particular D.C. race next year, you’ll be able to rank as many as five.)
Once the polls close and the votes are tallied, all the first choices are counted. If any one candidate gets more than 50% of first-ranked votes, they win the election. But if no one hits that threshold, the candidate in last place is dropped and the remaining votes are reapportioned to the other candidates.
So if your top choice gets dropped in the first round of counting, your second-ranked candidate picks up your vote. If no one crosses the 50% threshold in the second round, the cycle begins again and continues until one candidate wins the majority. (You can try out ranked-choice voting yourself here.)
Proponents say ranked-choice voting ensures that the winner of an election gets at least 50% of the vote; under the current system, winners of crowded races often claim only a plurality. (In the recent special election for the Ward 8 seat on the council, victor Trayon White won with just 28% of the vote against three other contenders.) And it gives people a broader array of choices, since they’re not relying on a single vote that may be shaped more by who they think can win rather than who they really support.
Critics, though, argue the system is convoluted and confusing – especially for voters who have been casting ballots the same way for decades.
“If our residents cannot understand ranked-choice voting or correctly use the ballot… then their votes may be cast but their voices will not be counted,” said Ward 7 Councilmember Wendell Felder, one of the chief proponents on the council of delaying its implementation for another two years, during the council hearing.
Educating voters
Some of those very concerns have been evident at the highest levels of the D.C. government. Although ranked-choice voting was approved by a super-majority of voters, Mayor Muriel Bowser didn’t allocate funding to implement it in her 2026 budget. It was only added at the last minute by the council, and the money wasn’t available to the elections board until the start of the most recent fiscal year – on October 1.
Speaking to lawmakers last month, Evans said the elections board is now in the process of finalizing its education and outreach campaign ahead of the June 16 primary. The board expects to send out postcards with information on ranked-choice voting, update its website with visual demonstrations and an FAQ, conduct townhall meetings, and even set up a faux polling place at its Navy Yard office where voters can cast mock ballots.
The goal isn’t just to introduce voters to ranked-choice voting, but also to manage expectations for the new system. Voting on Election Day may be slower, since ranking candidates takes longer, Evans said, and the rounds of vote-counting may not happen until 10 days after the election to allow for all late-arriving mail ballots to get to the board. The ballot itself will be larger (likely 17 inches long, up from the standard 14 inches), and there will be more pages.
Evans also said that she’d been in contact with jurisdictions that have already implemented ranked-choice voting, including Arlington, Virginia; Alaska; New York City; Minnesota; and Maine. Some of those have offered to share their own educational materials and experiences with their counterparts D.C.
But under repeated questioning from Felder, Evans carefully walked the line on whether the next seven months is enough time to introduce ranked-choice voting to the city’s residents.
“The one thing I have always said on voter education… more time means more touch points. The longer you have, the more people you touch, the more events you can have,” she said. Still, Evans added, there’s only so much that more time can do. “I can’t guarantee there won’t be confusion if we roll it out in June 2026 or June 3036.”
But minimizing that confusion is in the best interest of ranked-choice voting’s main proponents, who say they are ramping up their own education and outreach efforts to supplement what the board will be doing.
The campaign that put ranked-choice voting on the ballot last year has since launched the Grow Democracy D.C. Civic Education Fund, which kicked off its first education campaign at the H Street Festival in September with an Italian ice truck and mock ballot that allowed people to rank their favorite flavors. (Arlington County similarly used ice cream flavors as part of its voter education efforts ahead of its first RCV election in 2023. New York City used its boroughs.)
“We got a lot of engagement. A hundred and fifty people cast ballots,” says Brian Strege, the fund’s implementation director. Strege says the fund has been in talks with the elections board, and it plans to supplement the official education efforts with its own.
A push for delay
Despite such efforts, Felder has said he’s not convinced there’s enough time to adequately educate voters ahead of the June primary. Felder – who, critics point out, won a crowded election with only 24% of the vote – says that he plans on pushing legislation requiring that the elections board conduct a needs assessment, which would effectively delay ranked-choice voting by two years (he already introduced the bill once, but pulled it on procedural grounds).
And he’s not alone in advocating for that delay. The Ward 5 Leadership Council, a civic organization led by former ANC Commissioner Bob King and D.C. Democratic Party leader Hazel Thomas, is calling on the council to side with Felder. “Due to inadequate time and funding, we are deeply concerned that [the elections board] will run the risk of leaving many voters behind,” the group said last week.
In a separate report titled “Leave No Vote Behind,” King argues that voter education and outreach needs to take longer than seven months because of the significant number of seniors that have to be reached – more than 83,000 in total, some of whom may face challenges of vision impairment, low literacy, or limited mobility.
“If the [elections board] rolls out RCV at this time without enough time to fully implement for our special populations, it would upend our traditional democracy in favor of a system that few can understand and none can explain,” he writes.
Whether minority and low-income voters are more likely to be disenfranchised is one of the most contentious points of debate around ranked choice voting; some research leans to yes, other studies say not so much. A 2022 report assessing New York City’s first election with ranked-choice voting reported that while small disparities in understanding and use existed, most voters were comfortable with the system. (When put to the ballot box in 2024, 73% of D.C. voters approved of adopting ranked-choice voting, including 71% in Ward 5 and 70% in Ward 7.)
Evans also told lawmakers that the board may need more than the $421,000 that was initially estimated to roll out ranked-choice voting. While much of that money will go to paying for mailers, only $50,000 has been budgeted for education efforts. That’s the same amount that Arlington County spent, and it has less than half the population.
But At-Large Councilmember Christina Henderson, who has been supportive of ranked-choice voting since she joined the council in 2021, says there’s still enough time to educate voters – and that once the elections board publishes a mock ballot, they will start to better understand the new system.
Henderson also argues that the timing for ranked-choice voting couldn’t be better. There’s an open mayoral race that may attract significant attention – Ward 4 Councilmember Janeese Lewis George has already jumped in, and At-Large Councilmember Kenyan McDuffie is also expected to. The races for Ward 1 and an At-council seat have already drawn in a large number of contenders. Even the race for D.C. delegate to Congress – usually a sleepy contest – could have a half-dozen candidates in it.
“Given what is already brewing for the June elections,” Henderson says, “voters would be deeply dissatisfied if we didn’t have ranked-choice voting in the election, given the number of candidates that are emerging.”
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