Ranked Choice Voting in Minneapolis

Because of Ranked Choice Voting, election night is only the beginning of a vote count that could take as long as two months to complete for some races. If one candidate fails to reach the required 50 percent plus one vote threshold to win, Minneapolis elections officials start on November 4th with a complicated hand-counting process to tally people's second and third choices until the winner emerges. For voters, RCV offers a wide array of options providing--for the mayor's race, for instance--nearly a thousand different ranking possibilities. For elections officials, it's an exacting and daunting experience. My co-host Art Hughes talked with Minneapolis voting officials to ask them what they're up against.

The first thing Interim Minneapolis Elections Director Patrick O'Conner wants to do is warn voters the results of this election could take a little longer than usual.

"We have from the first Tuesday in November to the First Tuesday in January--we have that time to count ballots. And we're going to use that time carefully.
Patrick O'Conner, interim Minneapolis Elections Director."

This is a unique moment in the city's election history. For the first time, Minneapolis voters will be able to rank who their second and third choices are in case their first choice fails to get a majority. The only problem is, elections officials must tally those second and third choices by hand, which is slower than the much faster machine count in past elections. O'Conner says some races will be too close to call from the initial raw, unverified numbers released by the automated counts on election night.

"Only in the case where there's an absolute clear majority in the first choice columns could anybody infer anything from those results."

While the elections office has until January 3 to finish the count, O'Conner believes the counts for city ward races will start wrapping up within ten days and he hopes to finish counting all the races by Decmeber 21st. It's laborious and time consuming--with each vote getting examined by two sets of eyes, but O'Conner says it at least presents voters a level of scrutiny and transparency that might increase their confidence in the final result.

"Through the hand count that we'll be doing this year, we'll have the anticipated side benefit of going slowly so that people understand how their votes are being counted under ranked choice voting. So it's not altogether bad news that we're doing this by hand."

O'Conner also says citizens don't have the added public expense of a primary election, although the added time and salaries required for the hand count makes the cost come out about the same in the end.

On paper, Ranked Choice Voting is an algebraic puzzle for the elections office. Minneapolis Elections Technician Ginny Gelms says the mayor's race, for example, requires elections workers to anticipate hundreds of possibilities.

"If they filled out all three columns, with a different candidate on the ballot, you could come up with 990 possible different combinations."

The process is multiple seat races like the Park Board and the Board of Estimate and Taxation, where the top vote-getters win office in descending order until all the seats are filled. With Ranked Choice Voting for single-seat races like mayor and city council member, a candidate must meet the 50% plus one vote threshold in order to win. For multi-seat races the required threshold to win office depends on the number of seats to be filled. For the Board of Estimate and taxation, it works out that candidates must receive 33 percent plus one. For Park Board, the threshold is 25 percent plus one. In each case the candidate with the lowest number of votes is eliminated and those voters' second choices are added into the mix. The process continues until one person passes the threshold.

The process can be difficult to picture. But elections officials have broken it down into a series of piles at the city's elections warehouse in Northeast Minneapolis. Each pile is made up of individual counted ballots, starting with people's first choice, then those people's second choice and so on.

"First we do a first choice sort, then we work with one first choice pile at a time. When we divide that pile we do into second choices and then from that we only work with one second choice pile at a time. So we're only dealing with a small number of third choice piles at any given time."

Gelms says discussions with other places that have done RCV reveal that while there are hundreds of possible variations, ballots typically fit into only a handful of options since like-minded voters tend to vote similarly.

The city elections office has been going to various Minneapolis neighborhoods to check on people's understanding and acceptance of the new voting system. Afterwards, they intend to follow up with a survey to see what might need changing in the future.

Art Hughes

Art Hughes (email art@adhughes.com) is a freelance journalist in Minneapolis.