Few “instant runoffs” needed in Minneapolis

by Jeff Rosenberg | 4 Comments

There were no major surprises, and few chances to really see ranked-choice voting come into play in Minneapolis last night. Joe Bodell has the complete results at MN Progressive Project. There were a few races were 2nd-choice votes will be needed to officially put one candidate over 50 percent, but in all but one case the results are clear, with the leading candidate receiving 47 or 48 percent of the 1st-choice vote and the nearest challenger with under 40 percent. These races would all take miracles for the 2nd-place finisher on the 1st-choice votes to come from behind.

Park Board
District 5		 1st choice
Carol
Kummer		 2957 37.9%
Jason
Stone		 2788 35.7%
Steve
Barland		 1537 19.7%
McLaine
Looney		 151 1.9%
Dan W. Peterson 368 4.7%

There were two cases, though, where we’ll see ranked choice voting (i.e. Instant Runoff Voting) come into play, both involving the Park Board. In District 5, Carol Kummer and Jason Stone are nail-bitingly close. This one will be determined by 2nd-choice votes — in fact, it may even need to be decided by the 3rd-choice votes of those whose first choices were Barland and Looney.

Because Minneapolis voting machines could not be calibrated to tabulate anything other than the 1st-choice votes, the ballots will all need to be tabulated by hand, which means it will be some time before we know the winner of the Park Board race.

The other race that will take some time to shake out is the Park Board at-large race, in which none of the eight candidates for three positions received enough votes on the first ballot.

The mayoral race certainly didn’t lead to a surprise, as RT Rybak beat his nearest competitor by 63 percentage points among 1st-choice ballots.

November 4, 2009, 7:22 am | Category: Election Nights |

4 Responses to “Few “instant runoffs” needed in Minneapolis”

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  • Arvonne Fraser
    November 4, 2009 at 4:07 pm

    It also will be interesting to compute the cost of this election. In my precinct there were far more election judges per hour — or minute — than voters. Counting for the "run off" may be even more expensive. Voters were also cheated when we should have had three votes for three at large members for the Park Board and two for Board of Estimate. Instead, by my computation we got 1/3 or 1/2 a vote. What happened to the old "one man (woman?), one vote" idea?

    • Pete
      November 4, 2009 at 11:04 pm

      Good points, but I believe they're solveable. This is a radical change - it's going to take a lot of babysitting while the bugs are worked out and it stabilizes. But it's worth it.

  • Another Chris
    November 5, 2009 at 8:00 am

    Sometimes MNPublius commenter Charley Underwood lost his bid for City Council in Ward 12. I don't always agree with him, but I respect him for putting himself and his ideas out there. Ya got guts, man.

  • Don Huizenga
    November 5, 2009 at 4:56 pm

    I love the new instant runoff voting.

    Now

    When do all of the candidates run off?

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