Seattle,
get ready to
rank your vote.

Washington has a top-two primary. All of the candidates run on the same ballot, no matter their party. But up until now, voters have only been able to select one.

The August 3, 2027 primary. You'll rank candidates for your district's seat on the Seattle City Council — the seven district seats are all on the ballot that year. Mayor, City Attorney and the two at-large council seats aren't up until 2029, so those will come later. Everything else on your ballot works the way it always has.

The November general election also stays the same. Two candidates advance out of the primary, and you pick one.

Unfortunately, no. The ballot measure that passed in 2022 only applied ranked choice voting to municipal primary elections. Those are the ones that take place in August of odd years. Get ready to rank your favorite candidates for city council!

Instead of one bubble per race, you get a grid. Candidates run down the side and rankings run across the top. Fill in a bubble in the first column for your favorite, a bubble in the second column for your backup, and keep going as far as you want to go.

Two rules: one candidate per column, and one column per candidate. Try the sample ballot above.

Voters can rank up to 5 candidates. You never have to use all of the rankings — rank one, rank a few, or rank all five. Your vote counts the same either way.

There are a few ways to tackle this. Of course, you are welcome to rank just a single candidate. Your vote is not more or less powerful based on how many rankings you provide. You can also just rank the candidates that you can sort of stand more than the others. Those backups won't harm or get in the way of your number one choice.

Yes. The count only looks at your second choice if your first choice is already out of the running. There is no way to reach your backup ranking while your favorite is still in the race. This is the worry we hear more than any other, so we say it twice: rank as many or as few as you want.

Skip a number and the count moves on to your next ranking. Give two candidates the same ranking and the count stops at that point, though everything you ranked ahead of it still counts.

The exact rules are being finalized right now by King County's ranked choice voting advisory committee, working with the Secretary of State. That committee is fifteen people, including El Centro de la Raza, the Somali Family Safety Task Force, the Chinese Information and Service Center, and both the King County Democrats and the King County Republicans.

Everyone's first choices get counted. If two candidates are already so far ahead that nobody else can catch them, the count is over and those two go to November.

Otherwise the candidate in last place is eliminated, and anyone who ranked that person first has their vote move to their second choice. Count again. Repeat until two candidates are left.

FairVote Washington is working on exactly that question. At the moment Washington requires that no more than two candidates compete in the general election. Although we see that there are benefits to that system, we are advocates for combining the primary and the general through the Washington VOICES Act, the legislation we're working to pass in Olympia.

Probably not, and that's already true today. Washington votes by mail, so ballots keep arriving and getting counted for days after election day. King County will post first-choice totals on election night and run the rounds as more ballots come in. Certification takes a couple of weeks, the same as it does now.

We know how this sounds, but the answer really is that it doesn't help any parties. It only helps voters. Ranked choice voting allows voters to fill in their ballot with nuance. They can vote with their hearts and their heads. It's no longer about choosing the lesser of two evils.

Fair question, and here's what we know. In cities that have already made the switch, large majorities of voters tell surveyors the ballot was easy to fill out.

This question is the one King County Elections has spent the most time on. They started usability testing at library branches in 2023 on purpose, because a library gets you ordinary voters instead of people who already follow politics closely. Since then the testing has moved into community centers, aimed at neighborhoods that usually get skipped in this kind of research.

Education materials are being produced in Chinese, Korean, Russian, Somali, Spanish, Vietnamese and Arabic. A separate pilot program looks at what works for voters with intellectual and developmental disabilities, with recommendations due to the Legislature by the end of 2027.

There's a one-time cost. King County counts ballots with software from Clear Ballot Group, which had no ranked choice module. Multnomah County, Oregon needed the same thing at the same time, and between the two of them the vendor built it. Voter education costs money too, and it should.

After the setup, a ranked primary costs about what a regular primary costs.

Use this link! You can set up your own ranked choice voting elections from home. A few things to keep in mind: ranked choice voting only works if you have 3 or more options. And you also need a situation where you have fewer options than people voting. Otherwise all of the votes get spread out and you have a many-way tie.

Speaking of which — did you know that ties in Washington are decided by coin flip?