The Center for Election Confidence (CEC) submitted comments to the Virginia State Board of Elections opposing the Board’s Proposed Final Regulation amending 1 VAC 20-100, which would adopt new, less-transparent rules governing ranked choice voting in Virginia, making the already opaque process more difficult to understand and its results harder to reproduce.

CEC does not support ranked-choice voting (RCV) as a policy matter. As CEC explained in its comments, the core mechanics of RCV—including transferable votes and exhausted ballots—make RCV “fundamentally confusing, insufficiently transparent, harmful to voters’ confidence in elections, and wholly unfit for use in Virginia.”

The State Board’s proposed regulation would add “batch elimination” to Virginia’s RCV rules. Under batch elimination, multiple candidates could be eliminated in a single round if they are deemed “mathematically impossible” to be elected.

Yet, the Proposed Final Rule’s sense of “mathematically impossible” leaves many integral questions unanswered:

• whether “all votes credited” refers only to votes from active ballots credited to active candidates in the current round;
• whether exhausted ballots are excluded from the calculation;
• whether ranked choice overvotes, duplicate rankings, and skipped rankings are resolved under 1 VAC 20-100-40 before the calculation is performed;
• whether the calculation occurs before or after transfers in a round in which batch elimination is considered;
• whether unresolved write-ins or grouped write-in totals may or must be included in the calculation; and
• which person, and, if applicable, which approved tabulation tool is responsible for determining that the mathematical-impossibility standard has been satisfied.

CEC warned that this proposal would make an already nontransparent voting method even harder for voters to understand, observe, and verify. “Batch elimination may reduce the number of visible rounds,” CEC explained, “but doing so also compresses multiple tabulation steps into a single administrative or software-driven action.”

Rather than solving RCV’s problems, CEC noted, this shortcut “risks worsening the very transparency problems that make RCV objectionable in the first place.” If sequential elimination makes RCV lengthy or difficult to administer, CEC explained, that problem weighs against the use of RCV—not in favor of compressing multiple elimination rounds into a less transparent process.

CEC also argued that the proposal appears inconsistent with Virginia law. The Code of Virginia defines RCV as a process by which tabulation proceeds in rounds and, in each round, either a candidate is elected or “the last-place candidate is defeated.” CEC explained that the proposed batch-elimination rule would replace that statutory single-candidate elimination structure with a different process allowing multiple candidates to be defeated at once.

CEC further objected to language that could allow batch elimination to override Virginia’s public tie-breaking process by lot. Public drawing of lots is observable and capable of public verification. Software-driven batch elimination is not.

CEC urged the State Board to recall the Proposed Final Regulation and decline to adopt language introducing batch elimination.