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It's no sure bet, and a legal fight looms
Will Minneapolis pioneer instant runoff voting?
Last week, Minneapolis election department head Cynthia Reichert gave a lengthy PowerPoint presentation to the City Council on the hurdles facing her department as it prepares to implement instant runoff voting in the 2009 citywide elections.
After concluding her progress report, Reichert told a Star Tribune reporter what she'd shied away from making plain to the council. "I don't believe that the city of Minneapolis will be ready for a ranked-choice voting election with equipment in 2009," she said.
Reichert's unvarnished assessment, based on challenges in both buying and getting certification for specially designed voting machines, touched off something of a tempest. Jeanne Massey, director of FairVote Minnesota, which spearheaded the Minneapolis push for instant runoff elections, called Reichert's comments "counterproductive" and "wrong."
It wasn't just the peanut gallery weighing in. Councilman Cam Gordon, no doubt miffed that a staffer would publicly opine on a decision the council has yet to make, spelled out his position the next day in an online forum. "The real issue is not a lack of possibilities," he wrote, "but a lack of will to pursue them."
But Reichert's blunt appraisal underscores the difficulty Minneapolis faces in instituting instant runoff elections, which voters approved by an overwhelming two-to-one margin in November 2006. Nationally, instant runoff elections are a relatively new phenomenon, buoyed by backlash from the so-called "Nader effect" in the 2000 presidential race. With Minneapolis getting in so early in the game—it's among the first dozen cities nationwide to embrace IRV—there are few viable voting machines on the market. More troubling, not a single instant runoff-compatible machine has yet earned the all-important seal of approval from the Federal Elections Commission.
If the city can't get machines in time, it faces two unpopular options: Push back instant runoff elections to 2013, or revert to the time-consuming process of hand-counting ballots. Though the council has yet to formally consider a manual count, the very thought of it makes Councilman Gary Schiff cringe. "It raises the image of a Florida situation," he says.
But the future of instant runoff voting in Minneapolis is imperiled by more than elusive voting machines and a pessimistic elections department. Last August, Secretary of State Mark Ritchie, who assisted Minneapolis in coming up with instant runoff rules, asked the state's attorney general to outline the legal issues surrounding IRV. The response was troubling. Citing Brown v. Smallwood, a 1915 Minnesota Supreme Court case involving an IRV precursor in Duluth, the memo stated that if Brown holds up, then switching to instant runoff elections "probably is not permitted."
It was just the legal advice Andy Cilek hoped to hear. The Eden Prairie-based entrepreneur, who runs an anti-IRV group called the Minnesota Voters Alliance, wasted little time in using the nearly 100-year-old case as the backbone of a lawsuit filed in Hennepin County Court in December. "Our goal is to set a national precedent," he says. "This is going to be decided in the U.S. Supreme Court."
Cilek is no stranger to challenging election procedures. In 2006, he gathered thousands of signatures in St. Paul to get a referendum on the ballot to switch from nonpartisan to partisan primaries. St. Paul, like most Minnesota cities, has an open primary, with the top two vote-getters advancing to the general election irrespective of party, so long as no one wins a majority. With the bulk of St. Paul residents registered as Democrats, Republicans often fail to make it to the general election—a grave injustice in Cilek's eyes. "Each party should have the opportunity to be represented," he says.
In addition to insisting that IRV is needlessly complicated, he points out the flipside of the most common argument in favor of it: That it makes possible a scenario where a candidate wins a plurality but winds up losing after votes are redistributed. He also points to a nightmare scenario, known in academic circles as "nonmonotonicity," in which a voter could inadvertently harm her preferred candidate by ranking him higher than a less preferred alternative. "It's like putting a blindfold on the voter," he says.
Unsurprisingly, instant runoff advocates do not give great weight to Cilek's suit. The Duluth case on which it relies, they are quick to point out, involved a system similar to IRV, but which differed in that it didn't eliminate a voter's first choice when counting his second choice. "It's a baseless lawsuit," FairVote's Massey insists.
At the very least, however, Cilek's legal objections are likely to slow the city's already limping pace at getting instant runoff off the ground. If the city issues a request for proposals from voting machine companies as planned in April, Cilek's group is poised to seek an injunction.
For their part, city leaders are resigned to a legal fight. "We've had our lawyers look at the issue and we feel confident," says Elizabeth Glidden, who chairs the City Council's elections committee. "We will see what our court system has to say."