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D.C.’s move to ranked choice voting complicates two council races. Could lawmakers change how the city counts votes? 3%
By Akoma41%
7/23/2026, 6:09:25 PM
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D.C. ran its first election using ranked choice voting in the June primary without many glitches.
But there are still big questions lingering about how the system will work in November’s general election, particularly when it comes to the two at-large council seats up for grabs.
The D.C.
Council briefly considered making changes to the city’s methods for counting votes last week but ultimately abandoned the effort in the face of stiff opposition from activists.
Yet lawmakers could take up the idea again this fall, and debates about how the new system will impact the election haven’t died down.
The issue is a complex one, stemming in part from D.C.’s unusual rules around these citywide, at-large seats, and it’s led to accusations from both sides of the debate that voters could end up being disenfranchised.
“Whichever system you pick, it’s going to be perceived as putting the thumb on the scale for somebody,” said Brian Strege, one of the lead activists who pushed to bring ranked choice voting to D.C.
“But to abruptly change a system literally in the middle of an election, as we’re sitting between the primary and the general, is kind of insane.”
As it stands now, some fear the system advantages non-Democrats at the expense of Democrats: the vast majority of voters in the District.
That owes, in part, to the city’s unusual rules (imposed by Congress when it granted the District limited autonomy 50 years ago) around which party can hold these at-large seats.
One of the seats on the ballot this November is open to anyone, and has always been filled by a Democrat.
But the other at-large seat is reserved for someone who is not a member of the council’s majority party: traditionally, an independent.
In past years, voters got to cast two votes to simultaneously determine the winners of both races.
But with the advent of ranked choice, they’ll cast ballots ranking up to five candidates in order of preference.
And that’s where things get especially complicated.
The city determines winners in ranked choice races by initially counting all the first-place votes.
If anyone secures a majority, they win outright: otherwise, officials gradually eliminate lower-performing candidates and redistribute their voters’ second choices until someone cracks 50 percent of the vote.
(The system is generally described as a “bottom-up” method for counting votes.)
In practice, the Democratic nominee for one of those seats, as determined in June’s primary , is likely to win easily – this year, that’s shadow representative Oye Owolewa.
Since he probably won’t ever be eliminated from the running, the additional rankings from his supporters will never come into play for the second seat.
That means voters who rank any of the independents first will have more of a say in deciding that race, since it’s unlikely anyone secures a majority right away and it’s more likely their votes will be redistributed.
The upshot is Democrat voters will only really determine the outcome of one seat, and that has alarmed some on the council.
But the backers of the ballot measure that brought ranked choice voting to D.C. , known as Initiative 83, believe that’s not necessarily a bad thing.
If the purpose of reserving a seat for smaller parties is to enfranchise non-Democrats, then they feel it’s only appropriate to give non-Democrats a bigger say in the election.
“Folks who were excited to use their two votes are the people who were getting their way twice, when other people weren’t getting their way at all,” said Deb Otis, senior director of research and policy at the ranked choice advocacy group FairVote.
“This puts everybody on more equal footing instead of giving more power to some groups.”
Yet Council Chair Phil Mendelson was still concerned enough about the issue that he proposed moving to a different vote-counting method known as “multi-pass” instead.
The system would let officials count every ballot for both races: even if a voter ranked one winning candidate first.
Their second rankings would count toward the second race, mirroring the old system for electing these at-large seats.
“Under the new election system, the race for the second at-large seat becomes a fight over the non-Democratic vote only, a small minority of the electorate that is disproportionately whiter, wealthier, and more conservative,” Kurtis Hagans and Patrick Dalton, organizers with the city’s chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America, wrote in an article on the issue that was well-circulated among lawmakers.
“Effectively, 75% of voters (the Democrats) are allocated 50% of the at-large seats, while the 25% non-Democratic voters that cover a range of different political beliefs are also allocated 50% of the at-large seats.
This is extremely anti-democratic (with a small d), essentially giving Democrats fewer real votes than their non-Democratic neighbors.”
But Mendelson said at a council meeting last week that election officials told him some of his bill’s language was “messed up,” so he opted not to advance the bill.
With the council adjourning for its summer recess, that means the soonest any bill could come back up for a vote is the council’s next meeting on Sept.
22.
“It was good to have that conversation on the council, but it was really coming at the 11th hour,” Owolewa said.
“I do believe that we need to find a solution, but I don’t believe that the current planned idea by Chairman Mendelson was the right approach.
So I’m glad he pulled that legislation and hopefully in September and beyond we can address it in a different way.”
Strege is hopeful lawmakers will leave the system untouched this fall: particularly because the city will already have mailed ballots to voters by the time the council is back in session.
“You cannot change the rules of an election this late in the game,” Strege said.
“You really need to look in the mirror and think about this pretty hard before you do something like that.”
He suggests pushing off this debate until next year in order to “put as much distance between deliberations and the next use of this as possible.”
But he said he’s open to a conversation about broader reforms: for instance, lawmakers could arrange elections differently so the city isn’t electing two at-large members at the same time.
(However, this would require a change to the city’s charter, which would require help from Congress, making an already complex process even more daunting.)
The lack of stiff competition in this year’s race for the non-Democrat seat could blunt some of the momentum for immediate change.
Right now, Elissa Silverman is the heavy favorite in that contest — she won a special election to fill the seat through the end of the year after Kenyan McDuffie resigned from the council to run for mayor.
She’s running for a full, four-year term in November, but she has yet to draw many major opponents.
“I am running the best campaign I can run for November, and I will operate under the current rules of the game,” Silverman said after she was sworn in last week, declining to take a position on which vote-counting system she prefers.
Anyone hoping to run for the seat has until Aug. 5 to collect petition signatures for the chance to appear on the ballot.
The post D.C.’s move to ranked choice voting complicates two council races.
Could lawmakers change how the city counts votes?
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