INSTANT RUNOFF: Minneapolis Vote Tuesday Tests with Rank Choice Method
November 3, 2013
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Minneapolis on Tuesday will elect a new mayor in a new way.
The winner will be chosen from a list of candidates who voters will rank by their preference.
This complicated system is used in Ireland and Scotland, and, in some opinions, is more democratic and works against the most well-funded candidate winning.
Minnesota Public Radio explains:
"Instant runoff voting is also called ranked-choice voting, because it allows voters to rank the candidates for an office in order of preference. So you still get to pick the candidate you like the most, but you can also indicate which one your second and third choices."
Minneapolis voters approved instant runoff voting in 2006 for municipal offices, like mayor and city council. The new system won't affect races for the Legislature, Congress or the school board.
Earlier this year Minneapolis began testing its procedures. A mock election was held to gather feedback on the newly designed ballots. Then they had some experienced election judges counting the votes.
Under this system, counting ballots is a multi-step process. First, everybody's first choice for a given race is counted. If no candidate has more than 50 percent of the vote, you eliminate the candidate in last place. Then the votes are redistributed to the voters' second choice. The process keeps eliminating candidates and redistributing votes until someone gets a majority.
This year Minneapolis election judges will have to do most of that counting by hand.
"We would love to have machines to do this all for us," Minneapolis Elections Director Cindy Reichert said, but the vote counting machines Minneapolis uses are only capable of tallying the first choice votes.
So unless there's a winner in the first round, hand counting proceeds.
"There is no equipment currently on the market that does what we need it to do that is federally certified," Reichert said. Minnesota state law requires machines to meet federal guidelines.
The hand counting will not happen on election night. Judges will start counting the next morning.
Reichert is not ready to predict how long it will take to count up all the votes, but the practice run should give her some clues.
In the test, Minneapolis election judges spent two days counting just 600 mock ballots. 70,000 people voted in the city's last municipal election four years ago.
The biggest challenge for the election judges comes with multi-seat races, like the park board, where there's more than one winner. Applying instant runoff voting to those races is much more complicated. They have to use a mathematical formula to calculate fractions of votes -- and it's not just halves or thirds, either. They could be dealing with thousandths of a vote.
Several other U.S. cities, including San Francisco, use instant runoff voting. But Cambridge, Mass. is the only one that uses it for multi-seat elections. And they use a different method for calculating the results that doesn't involve fractions. Scotland uses the same method as Minneapolis, but machines are used do the counting.
"We're actually the first jurisdiction in the world that will be doing a hand count using the 'Weighted Inclusive Gregory Method of Single Transferable Vote,'" Reichert said.
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