Minnesota IRV

I wrote this blog entry before the 09′ Municipal elections but believe it is still relevant today as many groups are trying to enact Minneapolis and St. Paul IRV models for state wide elections. Given the historic 08′ senate recount many election law changes may be coming in the state of MN including a Photo ID push, Judicial Selection method changes, primary date changes, and several others. Below is my contention with the municipal IRV changes.

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I recently moved across the River from St. Paul to Minneapolis. The first piece of mail I received was an informational piece put out by the Minneapolis Elections Department. I failed to realize that other than switching my billing address with Comcast and Excel energy, I needed to learn how to vote again. Hopefully in the coming years you won’t have to.

Minneapolis is the first City in Minnesota to switch from traditional voting to “Ranked Choice Voting” (RCV) for their municipal elections. Some people may know the system as Instant Runoff Voting or IRV. This is a result of a public referendum in 2006 where the voters of Minneapolis chose this system by a slight majority of 52%. I’m not concerned about who voted, who didn’t vote. I’m most certainly not concerned about discussing ACORN or any of the things our 24-hour news cycle has taken from a YouTube clip simply to get my attention.  I am concerned that this system is a drastic change that will rock the fundamentals of our electoral system. The flaws that people see in the system could have been solved with simple common sense solutions.

The voters of Minneapolis will not use Ranked Choice Voting for all elections, but rather just for municipal elections. Obviously the city recognizes it does not have jurisdiction over statewide elections or elections reaching beyond the city limits. However, are we to imagine that voters will not be more confused or perplexed in those non-municipal elections? Nobody could think this after witnessing all the voting irregularities in this state last November. No voter could be that naïve after coming off the heels of one of the longest and most expensive recounts between Norm Coleman and Al Franken. Not to mention that voters will have to wait longer for the results of RCV according to recent reports, you cannot leave a choice blank, and ultimately your vote and mine are not considered equal.

We can all agree that things need to change about our flawed voting system where thousands of absentee ballots were wrongfully rejected last November. However, to completely overhaul the process by implementing this system is not the answer. Fair Vote Minnesota, one of several groups who successfully pushed for Ranked Choice Voting, claim that the RCV “maintains the majority rule”. Let us examine this. What this means is that a candidate running for Mayor must cross the 50% threshold to be considered victorious. Sounds simple enough. How you get there is a bit trickier. If candidate A and candidate B both receive 40% of the vote and candidate C receives 20% of the vote, the race would go to the “second choice” on the ballot. What happens here is important. Those 20% of voters who voted for candidate C have their votes re-allocated to candidates A and B pushing either of them across the finish line.

I agree that it sounds great and terrific that the person elected received 51% or more of the vote, but the way that candidate got there is fundamentally flawed. Doesn’t it seem as if the voters supporting candidate C chose the winner ultimately? Didn’t candidate C voters essentially have their vote counted twice? What happened to the idea of one person, one vote? Isn’t their something flawed with a Ranked Choice Voting system where the candidate who receives the most 1^st choice votes could lose based on a second choice or even third choice ballots?

When Coleman and Franken were tied we didn’t have Secretary of State Mark Ritchie summon all Dean Barkley voters to come back to the polls on November 5^th2008 and cast their ballots another time to decide the winner between Coleman and Franken. Why would we accept a system where that is our definition of fair and equal representation? We have taken a short cut because it is not politically expedient rather than forcing our elected officials to make tough decisions. Every voter has the ability to select his or her choice, not his or her choice if those people aren’t running, or are tied.

Everyone likes to imagine new ways to encourage people to vote or be more pro-active in public policy. This inherently un-democratic and flawed system is not the answer. The answer is political leaders who don’t disenfranchise the citizens, actually better our lives in a small but substantial way for once, and actually deliver on promises that at this point are all just empty rhetoric. The reason this is important is Minneapolis, and potentially St. Paul (voters will have a similar referendum this November) are test drives of the RCV system that many groups want to see implemented state wide. I believe there will be some changes in our voting system addressed at the capitol this session or next.  However, I hope to see more common sense changes rather than disenfranchising the citizens of Minnesotans whose vote only counts once.