Although the use of compensation of reactive power allows a higher loading in the electric system, it leads it to work closer to voltage collapse situations. Therefore it`s necessary to assess the behavior of the system regarding to this phenomena in the occurrence of the contingencies. In this work some existing methods are studied to check the capacity of ranking the contingencies that might affect the system, and how these methods rank them by severity and select those which are more damaging. The methods are studied having as the main focus the real-time operation. This work proposes a method which is able to rank and select a list of probable contingencies, having as a basis, nodal indexes of voltage security conditions assessment. These indexes are based on MVA margin to the maximum loading, indicate the region of operation on V x P,Q curve, and the relative importance among buses. The sensitivity index which indicates the reduction of the power margin before a contingency, is studied in detail. Besides the nodal analysis, it is proposed a form of a systemic analysis which is able to rank and select the contingencies according to their influence upon all electrical system. Numerical results corresponding to the North-Northeast Brazilian Interconected power system, with maximum load of June 1992 are presented. The analysis of computational efficiency of the proposed method showed that it`s possible to be used in real-time operation connected to the voltage assessment security tool, through a common structure of data to both procedures.