Why Ranked Choice Voting Was Bad for Virginia—and for Any State

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 state 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 one, ranking them in order of preference. If no candidate gets enough votes to win (usually over 50%), the person with the fewest votes is eliminated and his voters’ second choices count instead. This continues until there is a winner.

The Daily Signal sat down with one of the leading experts in the perils of using ranked choice voting, Jason Snead, executive director of the Honest Elections Project. He also managed the development of The Heritage Foundation’s Election Fraud Database, which aggregates a sampling of over 1,500 proven instances of voter fraud from around the nation.

Here’s the interview: