Challengers huddled across the street from the Dinkytown polling place. Photo: Chris Steller, MnIndy

They went there to ensure that nobody was wrongfully turned away from a Minneapolis polling place infamous for electoral mishaps. They ended up across the street, with police threatening arrest them if they set foot inside again.

On Tuesday night, election officials accused two men at a Minneapolis polling place of disturbing the voting process. Each had been officially designated by Ward Three council candidates to keep an eye on the proceedings at the University Lutheran Church of Hope, a short walk from the heart of the University of Minnesota campus-area commercial district known as Dinkytown.

The election judges ejected the challengers at about 6 p.m. Citing witnesses’ claims about raised-voiced disruptions, police refused to allow the challengers back inside.

But it’s not the first instance of election-day mishaps there: It’s the same polling place where 133 ballots went missing last year during the Franken-Coleman U.S. Senate recount. And it’s the same site where student residents were turned away from the polls despite having proof-of-residency documents that had allowed them to register to vote there in past years.

With those troubles in mind, candidates hoping to replace incumbent Council Member Diane Hofstede posted official challengers there Tuesday. (While other states have poll watchers, Minnesota’s election law terms candidates’ representatives who monitor polling-place activity “challengers.”)

Tensions between election officials and candidate challengers came to a head after a man who owns a house across the street was twice turned away with proof of residency documents deemed inadequate for same-day registration.

William Wells, a challenger for Republican Jeffrey Cobia, says he reminded officials about the missing ballots from last fall. Ryan Ahlberg, an attorney who DFLer Allen Kathir had designated as his official challenger, asserted his right to talk to voters about their eligibility to vote.

Election judges refused comment, but Ahlberg said they argued that challengers could only object to voters’ qualifications, not discuss options for proving residency.

First two and then three police officers arrived, kicking out the challengers as well as, in due course, a pair of reporters who had been alerted to the situation by Kathir.

The conflict spilled out of the church as darkness, rain and the temperature were falling.

Two squad cars idled empty for about an hour while officers spoke by phone with city officials, occasionally emerging to ask the challengers what they intended to do next.

One challenger asked police exactly what would happen should he try to re-enter the polling place. The answer: He’d get a citizen’s arrest warrant for trespassing and a trip downtown to Hennepin County jail that would last six to eight hours.

Ironically, that challenger was Ahlberg and not the representative of candidate Melissa Hill, who ran under the “Civil Disobedience” banner. Hill told the Minnesota Independent she isn’t sure the volunteer who offered to monitor voting for her in Dinkytown ever showed up.

In the end, Kathir appointed his campaign manager, Rick Brundage, to act as challenger for the 45 minutes of voting that remained.

Ahlberg and Wells said at least four to six people attempted to vote during the course of the day but were turned away and did not return.

By Kathir’s estimate that amounted to about 10 percent of the precinct’s total turnout.

The dispute over, Kathir returned to his get-out-the-vote efforts, shuttling students from nearby blocks to the church before the 8 p.m. close of polls.

Hofstede prevailed with 1,485 first-choice votes, to Kathir’s 348 and Cobia’s 242.

Hill had 112.

Photo: Chris Steller, Minnesota Independent

Minneapolis’ first try at instant-runoff voting (IRV) Tuesday went well, judging by a low number of spoiled ballots. But the number of ballots cast was also low, spoiling the system’s otherwise successful debut.

An Election Day that turned cold and rainy dumped water on IRV’s promise as a boost to voter turnout, which failed to match (let alone exceed) the 30 percent figure from the last city election in 2005.

“It worked pretty well,” said Council Member Cam Gordon, a Green Party leader who has fought long to bring IRV to Minneapolis. “People seemed interested in having a variety of choices [in candidates].

Still, he conceded, “I wish we had a bigger voter turnout.”

Gordon, who lost and then won in consecutive nail-biters in the last two city elections, coasted to victory Tuesday in Ward Two over Republican challenger Allen Aigbogun with first-rank votes on 85 percent of the ballots cast – the high water mark in all the contests for city office this year.

Only Anita Tabb, who ran unopposed for park board, won with a greater proportion of the vote (97 percent). Mayor R.T. Rybak gained 77 percent of the vote to best 10 rivals for a third term.

Gordon told the Minnesota Independent that he might have won the first time he ran in 2001, when DFLer Paul Zerby narrowly edged him in the general-election contest, had IRV had been in place then.

DFLer Allen Kathir, who placed a distant second Tuesday to DFL-endorsed incumbent Council Member Diane Hofstede in Ward Three, had an opposite reaction.

The old system of holding early-September primary elections — for which turnouts were typically microscopic — might have given him a better shot.

Had he gotten 348 votes – the number he received Tuesday — in the ward’s 2005 primary, he would have earned a higher-profile berth to take on Hofstede one-on-one in the general election.

A surprise newspaper endorsement gave Ward One DFL candidate Susan Howitz Hanna enough of a boost to place third in first-rank votes in an open-seat race that appears to have narrowly skirted a runoff.

DFL endorsee Kevin Reich squeaked by with barely 14 more votes than needed for the 50-percent-plus-one threshold for outright victory in a single-seat contest.

Hanna holds out hope that the race will be sent into a runoff by the hand count that’s required for every race because the city’s tally machines aren’t certified for IRV elections. But by randomly assigned sequence, Ward One will be last among the city’s 13 wards to be counted, putting that date with destiny off by as much as a month.

Mark Fox, an independent who finished last in the five-way Ward One race, would be the first candidate eliminated in a runoff. In Fox’s view, Reich’s bare-majority support, from “less than 12 percent of the people,” means “Minneapolis government is pretty evidently non-representative.”

“If this [election] were a council meeting, I would ask for a quorum call,” Fox wrote in a morning-after email.

Elsewhere in Minnesota news this morning …

MINNEAPOLIS: Flowers’ pot charge dropped. Friday was better for Al Flowers, a candidate for mayor, who had a possession charge dismissed. [Star Tribune]

SECOND CONGRESSIONAL DISTRICT: Kline wants Afghan ramp-up. U.S. Rep. John Kline saw President Reagan get a lesson in saluting, something President Obama will be doing more of if he takes Kline’s advice. [Minnesota Public Radio; New York Times]

MINNEAPOLIS: Episcopalians pass over lesbian, Native American in choosing new state bishop. Instead, it’s a white guy. [Associated Press]

SIXTH CONGRESSIONAL DISTRICT: Health care reform is “crown jewel of socialism.” U.S. Rep. Michele Bachmann urges foes to storm Washington, D.C. and “look at the whites of [her colleagues'] eyes.”  [Talking Points Memo]

STATEWIDE: Anderson starts campaigning on day 2009 candidates stop. Former state auditor Pat Anderson launches her 2010 guv bid with a 14-city tour today, the last day of 2009 electioneering in cities and school districts across the state. [Hot Dish Politics; Associated Press]

ST. PAUL: Lege also an unallotment victim. The state Legislature should change the law if citizen suit over Gov. Pawlenty’s cuts fails, says DFLer David Lillehaug. [MinnPost]

Minneapolis City Council candidates Allen Kathir and Melissa Hill. Photos courtesy of the candidates

New in Minneapolis: Every candidate in the running for a city office stays in the race through the general election on Nov. 3.

That’s no biggie for the kind of candidates who in past years could be confident of a first- or second-place primary-election finish. But for many lesser-known candidates, it may be the most significant element of the city’s new instant-runoff voting system (IRV).

With nearly 100 candidates having filed for city offices, IRV could theoretically trigger tallying of voters’ lower-ranked preferences in as many as 22 races. But most seats will probably still be won by a single candidate with a majority of votes. Those results won’t trigger IRV, meaning no second-round suspense for runners-up hoping to leapfrog into the lead past front-runners who hold mere plurality leads.

A typical race is in the city’s Ward 3, which drew five city council candidates this year — as it did last time, for an open seat in 2005. Then, only DFL endorsee Diane Hofstede and Green-backed Aaron Neumann survived the primary and campaigned into November.

This year, Hofstede (now the incumbent, again the DFL endorsee) must contend for three more months with all four of her challengers: Libertarian Raymond Wilson Rolfe, Republican Jeffrey Cobia, DFLer Allen Kathir, and Melissa Hill, who is running under the banner of “Civil Disobedience.”

Due to personal circumstances, Hill isn’t able to run the full-bore campaign she had planned on earlier in the year — when, she says, she was courted by several political parties, including the Greens.

But thanks to IRV and the lack of a primary election, Hill is guaranteed time to get out her message about the value of political protest and civil liberties.

Hill was among the 100 arrested in downtown Minneapolis after the Rage Against the Machine concert during the Republican National Convention (RNC) last year.

“They shouldn’t be mass-arresting people. It’s completely bogus,” Hill said. “People in power were complacent when that happened.”

Hill went on to volunteer with the Community RNC Arrestee Support Structure (CRASS) and organize protests against the Federal Reserve Bank.

Now she wants to “promote the idea of civil disobedience — and use electoral politics to do that.”

Running for election was already a cheap megaphone — “Filing for office only costs $20,” Hill notes — but under IRV it’s an even better value.

So far, Hill’s effort is focused on a few Facebook pages. Kathir, the DFL challenger, is on Facebook, too, but he also has a full-fledged campaign website up and running — on solar power, even. (He’s trying to run a carbon-neutral campaign.)

There he sports a broader platform than Hill’s: community and public safety, the environment, the economy, housing, and responsiveness to constituents. But like Hill, Kathir was motivated by a personal experience with city government — in his case, his service on the Minneapolis Commission on Civil Rights.

Cutting the commission off at the knees by eliminating its complaint investigations unit is a rare action that both Mayor R.T. Rybak and Gov. Tim Pawlenty approve. Kathir said he is disappointed in the mayor’s stance.

An engineer by trade, Kathir brings a scientist’s eye to the campaign, noting that IRV is “definitely the wild card in this election.” The challenge, he said, is educating voters that “it’s not just important who your first choice is.”

Still, the math of IRV — counting second-choice votes on a second round of counting if no one gets a majority of first-choice votes in the first time around — isn’t a ticket into office for a candidate without majority appeal.

“You’re not really going to be able to sneak by,” Kathir said.

Hofstede, who garnered majority votes in both the primary and general elections in 2005, sounded nonplussed about the prospect of facing multiple opponents for 12 more weeks. Her worry about IRV was a more commonly cited concern: voter education.

“There will be confusion with the election,” Hofstede said. “The information that’s coming out is not consistent.”