A majority of D.C. councilmembers are supporting a bill that would bring ranked-choice voting to D.C. as soon as 2024.

The bill, introduced Wednesday by At-Large Councilmember Christina Henderson and six of her colleagues, comes in the wake of New York City’s recent mayoral election, the first citywide election to be conducted using ranked-choice voting. The system allows voters to rank candidates in order of preference; if no one candidate wins an outright majority, the worst-performing contender is dropped and votes are recalculated using voters’ second choices, and so on until one candidate wins a majority of support.

Under Henderson’s bill, voters would be allowed to rank up to five candidates in any one race, like in New York. In a statement, she said New York City’s experience shows the benefits of ranked-choice voting.

“With the unofficial results of New York City’s primary election — the largest jurisdiction to use RCV — voters elected the second Black Mayor in the city’s history, the first ever majority female City Council, and an overwhelming number of voters ranked three or more candidates,” she said. “As D.C.’s elections become more competitive, it’s time to consider whether a new process for selecting our elected officials is needed.”

Advocates say ranked-choice voting helps do away with situations where large numbers of candidates split the vote, leaving the winner with only a small proportion of overall support. That was the case for Henderson herself, who won her seat with less than 15% of the vote in a field of 23 candidates vying for two At-Large seats. (Councilmember Robert White won the other seat with just shy of 26% of the vote.)

Ranked-choice voting also made a cameo in Virginia earlier this year, when Republicans used it during their statewide convention to pick their candidates for governor, lieutenant governor and attorney general. Political analysts noted that Republican leaders likely opted for the system to prevent any candidate — seven competed to be the gubernatorial nominee — from winning with less than majority support.

In 2020, the Virginia General Assembly passed a bill allowing localities to test out ranked-choice voting starting this month. State Sen. Adam Ebbin (D-Alexandria) said earlier this year that implementing it could do away with another occurrence in traditional elections: voters casting ballots not for the candidates they like most, but rather those they think can win.

“Ranked-choice voting would allow for a streamlined result that allows voters to vote their conscience rather than in a strategic attempt to thwart another candidate,” he wrote in a Washington Post op-ed in May.

Some elected officials in Montgomery County have similarly been pushing to adopt ranked-choice voting; they point to a 2018 At-Large race that drew 33 candidates for four seats, with the top vote-getter drawing 13% support, as the reason why. The measure hasn’t moved forward in Annapolis to date.

Still, ranked-choice voting may face resistance in D.C. Speaking to DCist/WAMU last year, Council Chairman Phil Mendelson said he’d want to see a study on ranked-choice voting done before any final decision is made whether to adopt it. Additionally, New York City’s experience raised questions as to whether a simple runoff between the top two vote-getters would have been easier to manage; critics also said some voters may have been confused by the new system, and the city’s elections board was criticized for making an error while tallying ballots. (Eric Adams, the city’s presumptive mayor who claimed victory in the Democratic primary, had initially sought to delay the system’s use.)

Henderson’s bill would require the D.C. Board of Elections to conduct a voter education campaign, focusing on seniors and low-turnout precincts. And should it pass, it would pair with another initiative D.C. borrowed from New York: public financing of campaigns, which was first used in the 2020 election cycle.

The push for ranked-choice voting — which was first proposed in 2015 by Henderson’s one-time boss, former councilmember David Grosso — comes as lawmakers are considering other changes to the city’s elections system. A bill from Ward 1 Councilmember Brianne Nadeau would let non-citizen permanent residents vote in local elections, and this week Ward 8 Councilmember Trayon White introduced legislation to allow residents to vote via a mobile app — a move skeptics say is unlikely to happen due to security concerns.