Voltage instability is a phenomenon that could occur in power systems due to stressed conditions. The result would be an occurrence of voltage collapse leading to total blackout of the system. Therefore, voltage collapse prediction is an important part of power system planning and operation, and can help ensure that voltage collapse due to voltage instability is avoided. Line outages in power systems may also cause voltage collapse, thereby implying the contingency in the system. Contingency problems caused by line outages have been identified as one of the main causes of voltage instability in power systems. This paper presents a new technique for contingency ranking based on voltage stability conditions in power systems. A new line stability index was formulated and used to identify the critical line outages and sensitive lines in the system. Line outage contingency ranking was performed on several loading conditions in order to identify the effect of an increase in loading to critical line outages. Correlation studies on the results obtained from contingency ranking and voltage stability analysis were also conducted, and it was found that line outages in weak lines would cause voltage instability conditions in a system. Subsequently, using the results from the contingency ranking, weak areas in the system can be identified. The proposed contingency ranking technique was tested on the IEEE reliability test system.