Irv

The No Bad Ballots Committee wants to thwart the adoption of Instant Runoff Voting (IRV) in St. Paul. The newly formed advocacy group argues that the system will confuse voters and result in the disenfranchisement of immigrants and the elderly.

Although Minneapolis held no primary election this year, candidates for city office still had to file “pre-primary” campaign-finance reports under a new ordinance passed this summer. Yet for two weeks after the Sept. 8 deadline, confusion and other delays kept a couple dozen candidate and political committee reports from reaching the public.

Thanks to instant-runoff voting and no primary, everyone running for office in Minneapolis will stay in the race through the general election. For lesser-known candidates, that may be most significant impact of the city’s new election system.

A flurry of candidate filings on deadline day brought to 22 the number of city races that could, in theory, be decided by instant-runoff voting (IRV). Last-minute filers included John Malone, a plaintiff in an anti-IRV lawsuit that the state Supreme Court rejected in June.

When Republican Tom Conlon leaves the St. Paul School Board this summer, he’ll also be leaving Minneapolis and St. Paul with only two elected city officials not from the DFL Party.

The St. Paul citizens who have been pushing for instant run-off voting will have a longer battle in the Capital City than their counterparts faced in Minneapolis. Several significant problems have been raised about the possibility of implementing alternate voting, the biggest of which would be conducting school board elections.

“St. Paul is the only city [...]

The St. Paul City Council heard several points of view on instant run-off voting at a policy session on Wednesday. IRV, which is being pushed in St. Paul after passing in Minneapolis, is an alternate voting method that would eliminate the primary election by having ranked voting.

St. Paul would face several issues that Minneapolis won’t, [...]

Frustration over elections from the presidential to mayoral levels has brought people out to a training for instant run-off voting and how to promote it at their precinct caucuses on March 6. People expressed concern over candidates winning with less than 50 percent of the vote. Julia May, of St. Paul, said she felt that [...]

Cross-posted at Vox Verax.
Last week Minneapolis voters overwhelming approved instant runoff voting for future city elections. Instant runoff voting, or IRV, allows voters to rank their candidate preferences on their ballots. The idea is that if no single candidate receives a majority of 1st choice votes, then the candidate receiving the least number of votes [...]