Among the bills that the Virginia General Assembly passed in its 2025 session was one that would bring a process called ranked choice voting to the commonwealth. Ranked choice voting has been gaining traction in some states while it has been explicitly banned in others.
Senate Bill 1009, introduced by Sen. Saddam Azlan Salim, a Northern Virginia Democrat, would have made ranked choice voting one of the approved processes to conduct an election in the commonwealth. Although the bill passed both legislative chambers, Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin vetoed the bill as well as a similar one in 2024.
Ranked choice voting started to catch on as “instant runoff” voting in the San Francisco area in the early 2000s and has gained support in places like Aspen, Colorado, and Burlington, Vermont.
The process allows voters to pick multiple candidates instead of choosing just…
