thuneThe ongoing U.S. Senate contest may have produced an unlikely victim: instant-runoff voting.

The controversial balloting system, in which voters rank candidates in order of preference, was on the agenda at Saturday’s Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party convention in St. Paul. At issue was whether the DFL should lend its blessing to a campaign aimed at adopting instant-runoff voting (IRV). Most significantly, this would mean that the party’s sample ballot — mailed to thousands of potential voters in the days leading up to an election — would instruct DFLers to vote yes on the ballot question.

The measure was backed by 58 percent of delegates. Unfortunately for IRV supporters, it needed to garner support from 60 percent of delegates to be adopted. The upshot: The DFL’s sample ballot will not instruct voters to support the adoption of IRV. While this may seem like a trifling development, in a city that votes overwhelmingly Democratic it could have a discernible effect on the outcome of the ballot referendum.

St. Paul City Councilman Dave Thune (pictured) and veteran DFL activist Chuck Repke led the opposition to the measure at Saturday’s convention. They passed out fliers with a ballot from Cambridge, Mass., which utilizes IRV, featuring 19 candidates for a city council post.

“Anyone who could look at that and not think that the average voter is going to find that totally frustrating is totally out of touch with the average voter in the City of St. Paul,” Repke said.

On another flier distributed by IRV opponents: mucked-up ballots from the contest between Al Franken and Norm Coleman. During the Senate recount, goofy ballots such as one endorsing “flying spaghetti monster” got most of the attention. But much more common were routinely botched ballots in which a voter’s intent simply couldn’t be discerned because of unusual markings.

Thune believes IRV would only compound such problems and disenfranchise voters. “While this may seem like a wonderful thing in Cambridge for a bunch of Harvard professors, we’ve got a general population that has trouble filling out one oval in a Coleman-Franken race,” he says.

What’s more, Thune argues that certain populations of voters, such as the disabled, immigrants whose first language isn’t English, the elderly –”all the people that supposedly as Democrats and liberals we’re bound to protect,” he notes–would be disproportionately affected by a more complex balloting system.

But former City Councilman Jay Benanav, who spoke in support of the measure at the convention, said the Cambridge analogy is misleading because City Council elections there are citywide. “We don’t have that here,” he says. “It’s by wards. You won’t have to rank 19 people.”

He also argues that there’s no proof that IRV has disenfranchised voters in cities where it has been adopted. “Every place it’s been tested it’s just never been a problem,” he said.

This doesn’t mean that IRV is dead in St. Paul. More than 7,000 residents petitioned the City Council last year to place the issue on the ballot in November. But under advice from the city attorney, the Council voted to table the issue until the courts ruled on whether such a balloting system is constitutional. In January, Hennepin District Court Judge George McGunnigle ruled that the system passed constitutional muster. While the issue is likely to be appealed to the Minnesota Supreme Court, it probably won’t keep the St. Paul City Council from authorizing the IRV measure to be on the ballot in November.

Benanav argues that not garnering sufficient support to get the measure on the DFL’s sample ballot is only a minor setback. “Would it be nice to have it? Of course it would,” he said. “Is it a critical or fatal flaw? Absolutely not.”