The No Bad Ballots Committee filed a complaint with the Office of Administrative Hearings over the endorsement claims at the end of October, then followed it up days later with a second complaint. At issue were listed endorsements of the voting system by the League of Women Voters, John McCain and Barack Obama. Under state election law, a campaign cannot claim the support of an individual unless that person has provided written permission.

“I was surprised that Santa Claus and Jesus Christ weren’t on the list,” Chuck Repke of No Bad Ballots told the Minnesota Independent last month. “You can’t be more deceptive than to claim the endorsement of the President of the United States when you don’t have it. I’m just flabbergasted.”

The ruling doesn’t affect the city’s implementation of IRV, scheduled to begin in 2011. Attorney Jay Benanav, who represents the Better Ballot Campaign, tells the Star Tribune the group could appeal the decision but hasn’t decided whether it will yet.

St. Paul voters will decide next month whether to adopt IRV, which gives voters the opportunity to rank candidates in order of preference. Minneapolis will be utilizing such a system, also known as ranked-choice voting, for the first time this year.

“There’s been no opposition anywhere in the country,” says Chuck Repke, co-chair of the No Bad Ballots Committee. “We just finally decided we’ll step up and do it.”

Supporters of Instant Runoff Voting, most notably FairVote Minnesota, argue that it encourages greater participation in the democratic process and allows voters to back their favored candidate without having to worry about a spoiler affect. They also believe that it encourages less negative campaigning.

But Repke, who helped defeat a resolution backing instant-runoff voting at St. Paul’s DFL party convention in March, believes that champions of the novel voting method have mislead the public about its merits.

“They claim that instant-runoff voting will do everything but clean my laundry for me,” he says. “What these people get away with is amazing.”

Repke points to the experience of Pierce County, Wash., as evidence that ranked-choice voting will prove a debacle. Last year the county spent $1.7 million to implement IRV after voters passed a resolution adopting the new system. But a survey of voters indicated that roughly two thirds didn’t like the new system. There is now a measure on the ballot to do away with the voting method.

The No Bad Ballots Committee will spend the next month attending political events and distributing literature in hopes of preventing a similar experience in St. Paul.

“I’ve spent 38 years trying to get people to vote in this town,” says Repke. “I’m sure as hell not going to give up and turn it over to some system that will confuse and disenfranchise voters.”

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.”

Photo: tomconlon.org

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. Conlon announced yesterday his resignation from the office he has held since 1991. He will leave the school board July 6 to run an inn in Asheville, N.C. St. Paul will hold a special election in November to fill the vacancy for the remaining two years of his term.

Conlon’s announcement came two days after he cast the only vote against letting Webster Magnet Elementary change its name to “Barack and Michelle Obama Service Learning Elementary,” St. Paul Public Schools spokesman Bret Johnson tells the Minnesota Independent. 

Conlon opposed the renaming as premature (an opinion in line with Arizona State University’s decision not to award President Obama an honorary degree). It was another in a long line of lonely votes Conlon has taken in conflict with the board’s prevailing DFL majority. 

With Conlon gone, two Minneapolis Green Party members — Cam Gordon on the city council and Annie Young on the park board — will constitute the remaining bulwark against total DFL domination of elective offices in the state’s two biggest cities.

Gordon appears set to win re-election this fall in a walk. His only announced challenger so far, DFLer Charles Carlson, dropped out amid a welter of unhelpful revelations.

Young is another story. She’s in competition with three DFLers to keep her spot as one of three at-large commissioners on the Minneapolis park board. Her opponents are the two other current at-large incumbents and a former commissioner — all three of whom won the party’s endorsement by acclamation at the DFL city convention last weekend.

Beyond the challenge of running citywide campaigns for low-profile seats, the at-large candidates must contend with what’s being billed as the world’s first multi-seat election to be conducted via ranked choice voting (also known as instant runoff voting, or IRV) — without computers that can do the counting.

The Minneapolis City Council heard yesterday that counting ballots in that election is expected to be so complex that voters may not learn who they elected until after Thanksgiving.