After all that, now we wait? For a week? Ten days? Janeese Lewis George has evidently won the D.C. mayoral primary election, convincingly. But no victory is convincing enough for the District’s new ranked-choice voting system, which, according to the city’s politicians, bureaucrats, and activists, requires that we be patient.
The final results of the election – both in Lewis George’s apparent majority win and in a couple of closer Council races – will be revealed when the elections board is good and ready. Learn a little civic patience, we’re told: Trust us. Trust the system.
Um, have they read the room? There’s plenty of suspicion in the air these days. We’re gorging on frustration. But trust? Precious little of that, especially around here.
This regression to a vote-counting pace that seems like something out of the 18th century is not the result of incompetence or conspiracy. It stems, rather, from a peculiar kind of corruption – a moral rot, fueled by righteousness, and a disturbing fear of being found to be less than ideologically pure.
Even though D.C.’s elections board was for decades perfectly capable of delivering election results in just a few hours, Washington voters Tuesday night got only partial numbers and now will need to wait, for two reasons:
First, it takes longer to count ranked-choice ballots because you are potentially conducting several elections in succession — and that can’t be done until every ballot arrives. Elections workers will have to process tens of thousands of ballots that were mailed-in or dropped in collection boxes. In races where no candidate has won an outright majority, such as the at-large Council election in which Oye Owolewa leads and the Ward 1 race, officials will have to conduct additional rounds of counting to add voters’ second and subsequent choices to the mix. All that just can’t physically be done in one evening, the city’s elections director, Monica Evans, said last week. The final count might take 10 days, which is longer than even California takes. “It just comes down to patience,” Elections Board chairman Gary Thompson told City Cast’s Emma Uber.
Advocates for the city’s new ranked-choice voting system won over voters in the 2024 ballot initiative by arguing that this confusing method of ranking candidates would deliver a pure shot of democratic adrenaline. In fact, though, ranked-choice distorts the voting power of a relative handful of citizens – it unfairly empowers supporters of the least-popular (and sometimes most radical) candidates. (If no candidate wins a majority in the raw vote, it’s the supporters of the last-place finisher – by definition, the least appealing and most out of the mainstream candidate – whose second choices get elevated first.) It’s a system that few people understand and one that’s been extraordinarily poorly explained.
The second reason for the Great Wait is a pervasive and sad epidemic of fear that has infected the Democratic party and its various strands of liberals and lefties – a fear that if they dare to speak up for election integrity and efficient vote-counting, they will somehow be tagged as members of a MAGA mob hungry to undermine democracy.
Why would the Dems – both those who control the city government and those who want to get back in national power -- permit the idea of enhancing election security to be entirely hijacked by the venal operatives of The Trump Show? I enjoy the smalltown convenience and the trust implied by being able to vote in D.C. simply by stating my name at the registration table. But let’s be rational: In a society where you (bizarrely) can’t be seen by a doctor or gain entry to many office buildings without showing ID, there’s nothing oppressive or unfair about having to prove who you are to vote.
Similarly, imposing an earlier deadline for mail-in ballots so that they can all be tallied by Election Night would be perfectly reasonable. No one complains that the start date for early voting is chosen arbitrarily, and no one should whine if the deadline is a bit earlier than Election Day. I believe in voting in-person on Election Day, if only because stuff happens in the final days of campaigns and I want to be able to factor that into my choice of candidates. (Try it sometime: It’s one of our country’s most stirring rituals of community-building.) Those who want to vote early should pay a small price for that luxury: You need to vote a little sooner than your neighbors do, for the sake of building both efficiency and trust.
One of the many reasons D.C. voters approved ranked-choice was the failure of the No campaign in 2024 to show how the system has disappointed voters in other places that adopted it. In Maine, according to a study by political scientists Cynthia McClintock of George Washington University and Joseph Cerrone of Haverford College, voters “were very dissatisfied with a come-from-behind victory under ranked-choice voting.” That is, when a candidate who came in second in the regular voting was then elevated to the winner’s circle in the later rounds of the ranked-choice process, voters realized that the new system breaks a cardinal rule of fairness: It automatically turns winners into losers. (Runoff elections, in contrast, don’t leave that sour taste in voters’ mouths, the study found; they’re a fair and reasonable way to make sure a winner has majority support.) “To our surprise,” the study’s authors concluded, “voters were not troubled by the election of a winner without majority support under [the] plurality” voting system that most American elections use.
Other studies similarly have found that the ranked-choice system does nothing to boost voter confidence.
The fault lies not only with advocates of ranked-choice voting, though they do deserve blame for trying to fix a non-existent problem, at least in mayoral races: Only once in the past three decades did the winner of D.C.’s Democratic primary for mayor win less than 49 percent of the vote (Muriel Bowser in 2014, when she first won with 43 percent support in the primary.)
The city government bears some responsibility here too. Most places that use ranked-choice manage to get all the counting done within 24 hours. The District this year moved aggressively to encourage mail voting, sending a ballot to every voter’s home. Now, every one of those envelopes has to be manually opened, examined and tallied.
It’s too late to fix the system for this cycle, but all is not lost. Ranked-choice voting, instituted in about 60 communities across the country, has already been repealed in places such as Burlington, Vermont (after ranked-choice voting resulted in the election of a mayor who had not won the plurality in the first round of counting.) Seven states have voted against switching to ranked-choice and another 19 states have banned the system. After this wait is over, let’s rebuild trust. Let’s call the person who collects the most votes the winner.
Marc Fisher is a contributing columnist at City Cast. He has covered Washington for 40 years, most of them at The Washington Post, where he spent a decade as the local columnist. He was sacked from his position as op-ed columnist at The Post in 2025, when the paper's owner ordered an ideological pivot.
