Lynchburg Republicans are about to have a political showdown between 2 rival factions

Lynchburg Republicans will finally have their long-awaited showdown between two rival factions on Saturday when the party holds a nominating event to pick three candidates for the city council.

It’s hard to tell who will win, but we already know one of the losers: ranked-choice voting.

Lynchburg Republicans are trying to become the first in the state to find a way to nominate their candidates without using a state-run primary — and still meet the legal thresholds laid in a recent state law commonly known as “Helmer’s Law,” after its sponsor, Del. Dan Helmer, D-Fairfax County. That law comes very close to requiring parties use state-run primaries for any nominations (except in special elections, where a tight calendar often precludes a formal primary with all of its early voting). Lynchburg Republicans, who don’t like the state telling them how to run things and worry that non-Republicans might vote in a primary, want to turn that “very close” into an actual path to a different process. I’ve written on that before, if you want more details. So far, they appear to be on a path toward making this work; Helmer has asked Attorney General Jay Jones for a formal opinion but Jones hasn’t replied, and may lack a legal mechanism to intervene unless some Lynchburg Republican wants to go to a Democratic attorney general and claim they qualify somehow as an “injured party” because of the rules. That seems unlikely.

Lynchburg Republicans are now on a course toward Saturday’s “firehouse primary” — which is neither in a firehouse nor is a primary in the customary sense. It’s a party-run event with a single polling location (Brookville Ruritan Club) with different voting hours (8 a.m. to 3 p.m.) and no early voting, except for a handful of “protected classes” spelled out under Helmer’s Law, most notably military personnel. Prospective voters also will be screened somehow to make sure they really are Republicans; Cardinal’s Emma Malinak will have more on this in a report later this week.

Initially, Lynchburg Republicans decided to pick their nominee through ranked-choice voting — even though they had previously gone on record against such a system. The official rationale was that, with 10 candidates seeking three nominations, they wanted to guarantee the winners were backed by a majority of those casting ballots.

Had they done so, Lynchburg Republicans would have been the first Republican unit in the state to use ranked-choice voting for a local nomination, according to state party chairman Jeff Ryer. The party used ranked-choice to pick its nominees for governor, lieutenant governor and attorney general in 2021 when pandemic-era rules prevented the party from holding a convention. Republicans in the 10^th Congressional District have also used ranked-choice in the past to pick a nominee, Ryer said.

Lynchburg Republicans could have been a first with something else, too: the first Republican unit in the state to use ranked-choice voting in a race where multiple nominations are available. Last week, the party abruptly scrapped that plan and will now go with the traditional method of plurality voting. Whichever three candidates get the most votes win, regardless of whether those candidates have a majority or not.

That decision has some fascinating political implications for Lynchburg but first, for the political nerds among us, let’s look at why Lynchburg Republicans backed off from ranked-choice voting, because it might hold lessons for ranked-choice voting advocates statewide (as well as ranked-choice voting opponents).

In 2020, the General Assembly gave localities permission to use ranked-choice voting in elections for boards of supervisors or city councils. In 2023, Arlington County became the first to actually do so. In Charlottesville, Democrats used ranked-choice voting to pick nominees for the city council. So far, those are the only localities to use it, and therein lies a challenge for ranked-choice voting advocates. Ranked-choice voting is often seen as a liberal invention. It’s not; Alaska uses ranked-choice voting and Alaska is many things (cold, full of bears, and so far north that there’s an annual baseball game played at midnight when the sun is still shining) but liberal is not one of them. Still, that’s the perception and in politics, perception often doubles as reality.

This year the General Assembly passed — and Gov. Abigail Spanberger signed — a bill to expand the option of ranked-choice voting to other local offices. (For those of you keeping score at home, the sponsors were Sen. Schuyler VanValkenburg, D-Henrico County, and Del. Katrina Callsen, D-Charlottesville.) This may be one of those cases where what’s notable is the dog that’s not barking. There are lots of liberal localities around Virginia that haven’t adopted ranked-choice voting — and certainly lots of conservative ones. When (if ever) will we see more interest from some of them?

That’s what made the Lynchburg Republicans so interesting. Although their nominating process is a party-run one, the fact that they were going to use ranked-choice voting seemed, well, significant. It was certainly interesting. When the local Republican Party asked the state Republican Party for advice, the locals were directed to one of the state’s preeminent experts on ranked-choice voting: Sally Hudson, a former Democratic legislator from Charlottesville. Politics does, indeed, make for odd bedfellows. It was Hudson who advised Lynchburg Republicans that if they had 10 candidates, voters should rank only seven. That engendered some suspicion among one faction of Lynchburg Republicans, but Hudson explained it to me as a simple math thing. “With 10 candidates, it can take up to 7 rounds (10 – 3) rounds to find the winner — one round to eliminate each of the 7 losers,” she said by email. “For that reason, we only need to ask voters for 7 ranks. Their 8th, 9th, and 10th preferences will never be used in the counting process. In other words, if you really hate the 3 front-runners, the order in which you dislike them won’t matter. Since the other 3 rankings can’t be used in counting, it just makes the ballot a little simpler not to include them.”

We’re now getting close to why Lynchburg Republicans eventually decided not to use ranked-choice voting: Some of them found it too confusing. They also didn’t like the only method available to them.

Here’s where ranked-choice voting does get confusing: There are multiple ways to do this.

Steve “Doc” Troxel, a member of the balloting and counting committee for the firehouse primary, told fellow Republicans in a memo that “At our April 3rd meeting, we were discussing three different ways of counting the ballots, since each method of counting ballots produced different results from the same sample of ballots.”

That what weirds out some people: Different methods can produce different results. Ultimately, though, the state party told Lynchburg Republicans that the only method they endorsed is one commonly known as “bottom-up” ranked-choice voting, in which the last-place candidates are eliminated, in which case the candidates their supporters ranked second get the vote.

I talked to ranked-choice experts across the country and they all said that’s considered one of the least acceptable forms of ranked-choice voting. Many of them favor a system where any “surplus” votes that the winners get go to that voter’s second-place candidate.

Two members of the balloting and counting committee, led by former council member Jeff Helgeson, objected to the state party’s preferred system and wanted to invent their own. Their proposal was hard to describe; I showed the document being circulated to some ranked-choice voting experts and all said they’d never seen such a thing. “I have never heard of RCV being conducted like this,” said Andy Eggers, a political science professor at the University of Chicago, who I asked to review the plan.

In the end, the whole ranked-choice experiment was scrapped. That may be for the best.

“Ranked-choice voting doesn’t graft well onto a multiseat district,” says Jack Santucci, who teaches part time at George Washington University and is regarded as an authority on electoral systems. It can be done, but it’s often confusing. People don’t like to be confused. They understand systems where the people with the most votes win, even if it’s less than a majority — the British call this the “first past the post” system.

While ranked-choice advocates may be sorry to see Lynchburg Republicans pull back, probably better that they do so rather than proceed with a system that would confuse people — and cause public relations headaches.

Now, here’s where the high-minded rationales for ranked-choice voting collide with messy political realities. In multiseat districts, ranked-choice voting also tends to produce proportional results. Hudson went through the math with me on several systems, and concluded with: “So yes, either way, RCV is more likely to produce a split ticket than the typical block voting — where everybody gets 3 votes and the biggest block picks all 3 seats. That’s why block voting is known as a ‘winner-take-all’ voting system.”

If you were designing an electoral system that wanted to nurture the civic health of a community, and make sure everybody was represented, you might well want a system based on proportionality. However, that’s not how the real world works. There are two factions of Lynchburg Republicans that seem to pretty much hate each other — and neither side wants the other to get any seats. Each wants to sweep. They have proportionality now — incumbents Stephanie Reed and Larry Taylor are in one faction, incumbent Marty Misjuns is in another — and that’s part of the problem. They just can’t get along much of the time. It would be quite the irony if Lynchburg Republicans were to go through all these gyrations to create a new voting system and then wound up with exactly the political lineup they have now.

I have to wonder if some Lynchburg Republicans started to figure out that ranked-choice voting ran a chance of producing a split ticket and that’s why some reservations started to creep in. The complicated system that Helgeson proposed warned of exactly that, although the proposal he circulated used more hypothetical language. The ranked-choice voting academics who had a look at it questioned whether it was truly ranked choice. “It seems a search for a system that preserves the winner-take-all character” of a more conventional election, Santucci said.

Now Lynchburg Republicans have the genuine article: an old-fashioned vote where the three candidates with the most votes win, which sets up a climactic battle between the two factions. On this side, the ticket with Misjuns, Veronica Bratton and Trae Watkins. On the other side, the ticket with Reed, Taylor and Chris Boswell.

If supporters of both factions stick together, and back all three of their candidates, then one of those slates will probably defeat the other. It may be close, it may not be, but we might get some kind of finality (at least in this round) to some long-running political conflicts in Lynchburg. In political terms, this is King Kong vs. Godzilla and no, don’t read anything into those names. They’re just more interesting than using, say, the Hatfields and the McCoys, or the Capulets and the Montagues of “Romeo and Juliet” fame.

Of course, there are other scenarios. One is that the tickets run very close to each other. If that happens, and if the leading ticket (let’s call it Slate A) has a candidate who runs a little behind the others, and the ticket that runs just behind (let’s call it Slate B) has a candidate who runs somewhat ahead of the others on that slate, then it’s possible there would be a split, with two candidates from Slate A winning while the leading candidate for Slate B edges out the third candidate for Slate A. That’s an argument for supporters of each slate to make sure they back all three of their candidates, lest somebody from the other slate slip in.

So what about the other four candidates in the field: Greg Berry, Farid “FJ” Jalil, Zach Melder and Ryan Thomas? In a ranked-choice election, their voters would matter a lot — because even if those candidates got eliminated, their voters’ second or third choices would still count toward other candidates. In a ranked-choice system, even if Slate A or Slate B ran first in the opening round, it’s possible that one of those “other” candidates might eventually win as second-choice and third-choice votes are taken into account.

In the winner-take-all system, those “other” candidates only matter if one or more of them can get more voters than some of the winners on whichever slate runs best. That means, those four “other” candidates likely need a fair number of voters to refrain from straight-ticket voting and do some mixing-and-matching: I like these two candidates on this slate, but not that one, so I’m going to vote for this other candidate over here.

Of course, what those “other” candidates really need is for their voters to only vote for them — to forgo two of their votes and “single shot” them, so that their supporters don’t accidentally boost someone else who might edge them out.

When multiple seats are available, the voting requires some strategy — much like ranked-choice voting.

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