Front Page - Instant Runoff Voting - Instant Runoff Voting

Was the new Instant Runoff Voting (IRV), sometimes called Rank Choice Voting (RCV), a boom or a bust? It depends on your perspective or whom you ask. The world didn’t come to an end. There didn’t seem to be mass confusion and there weren’t massive amounts of spoiled ballots.

In the 4th Ward there were 128 spoiled ballots out of 3299 ballots cast and in the 5th Ward there were 151 spoiled out of the 2170 cast. On the other hand, we didn’t know all the winners by the time we went to bed on election night or, in some cases, even by the following week.

Both the 4th and 5th Ward races went to a second round of hand counting because none of the candidates received 50%+1 of the votes in the first round of counting. The winner of 5th Ward, Don Samuels, wasn’t announced until November 13 and the 4th Ward winner, Barb Johnson, wasn’t announced until November 16. The counting had to be done by hand because none of the voting machines that are capable of counting ranked voting has been certified, and Minnesota requires all voting machines to be certified.

Two things we knew right away were the winner of the mayor’s race, which went to RT Rybak who received 73 percent of the 1st choice votes, and the outcome of the charter amendment that was on the ballot. The voters rejected getting rid of the Board of Estimate and Taxation by almost 65 percent.

There was a very light voter turnout on Election Day. In Minneapolis only 19.5 percent of eligible voters actually voted. Some folks blamed it on people staying away from the polls because of IRV, but many others blamed it on the weather and a mayoral election that seemed to many to be all sewn up from the get go. Still others feel it may be because the DFL Sample Ballots didn’t arrive in many people’s mailboxes until after the election. Some people felt IRV helped the incumbents more while others felt it helped the lesser-known candidates more. There were also folks in some wards who felt that the incumbents were campaigning harder to retain their seats this election because of IRV knowing that if they didn’t reach that 50%+1 threshold on the first choice count they could very well lose the race. So was Instant Runoff Voting a good thing or a bad thing? You’ll have to decide for yourself.

Note: the Minneapolis Office of Elections has announced their “unofficial” results, but the hand count won’t be “official” until December 21. For info go to www.minneapolis.mn.us/elections.