Ranked-choice voting is earning growing support in Minnesota and across the U.S. But in a recent Star Tribune op-ed (March 3, 2010), Andy Cilek and Matt Marchetti, like other opponents who favor the status quo, contend that the system has fatal flaws. Cilek and Marchetti represent the Minnesota Voters Alliance, the conservative interest group that took RCV to court in Minneapolis and lost. In a unanimous decision, the Minnesota Supreme Court resoundingly dismissed the MVA’s arguments and affirmed the constitutionality (i.e., one-person, one vote principle) of Ranked Choice Voting.

Not to be deterred by seven Supreme Court Justices, they present two more hypothetical scenarios that might prove the Court wrong or somehow show that Ranked Choice Voting (RCV) doesn’t work. Referencing the Minneapolis 5th District Park Board race, they trot out – once again – the idea that under RCV, voters harm their favorite candidate by voting for them. Nonsense.

Before we refute their arguments, a little background: The MN Voters Alliance is the same group that attempted to bring partisan primaries back to big-city municipal elections -- and is now pushing for voter photo-id requirements. When they lost their case against RCV in district court, they appealed, taking their argument all the way to the Minnesota Supreme Court. When the state’s top court ruled unanimously against them, they vowed to take RCV back to court and prove it unconstitutional based on the outcomes of the Minneapolis elections. Meanwhile, the MN Voters Alliance filed a lawsuit against RCV in Aspen, Colorado.

RCV opponents come from the other side of the political aisle as well. In St. Paul, the lead opponent is Chuck Repke, a credentialed DFLer who has long operated in the local political scene and who’s partial to politics as usual. Voters resisted his fear-mongering and passed RCV in St. Paul last year.

Under RCV, winners are elected by more voters and voters preferences count the way they want them to

Here are the oft-repeated arguments that Cilek and Marchetti make in their Star Tribune commentary:

1) They note that 52 voters in the Minneapolis 5^th District Park Board race ranked all three preferences but not one of the top two finalists, and thus did not have their ballots counted in the final round. They suggest that those voters had their vote unfairly disqualified because they were limited in their ability to rank more than three choices—i.e., if they were allowed to rank additional choices, they would have voted for one of the finalists and their vote would have counted. 

We don’t know what the preferences of these 52 voters were. What we do know is that in the unlikely event all of these 52 voters wanted to rank additional choices, they would have accounted for 0.0066 percent of the 7,848 valid ballots cast in that election.

More importantly, the inability to rank more than three choices is not a flaw of the voting method, but rather a limitation of the current equipment scanners, which cannot read more than three columns of choices. New voting machine technology provides the option to rank more than three choices; this capability should be standard in the next generation of equipment in Minneapolis (and elsewhere) so that voter preferences are not restricted due to technical limitations.

2)  They note that the winning candidate in the 5^th District Park Board race, Carol Kummer, had just 46 percent of total votes cast. This is true, and it is an accurate representation of the number of voters who chose to express themselves as Kummer supporters. The winner had a majority of total votes cast in the final round.

In an RCV election, the winning candidate always has a majority of ballots cast in the final round. Sometimes this is a plurality of total ballots cast in the initial round, sometime it is a majority. This depends entirely on voter preferences and is no different from the way a runoff works in a traditional two-round election, in which a voter whose first choice has been eliminated in the first election may not return to the polls to cast a vote for one of the remaining candidates in the second election.

In this race, and in all races that went to a “runoff” in Minneapolis’ inaugural RCV election, the majority of voters ranked at least two choices. And in all single-seat races, except this one, the winning candidate received a majority of total ballots cast.

Moreover, the winning candidates were decided by more voters than they would have been under the former two-round (primary-general) system, in which only a fraction of voters would have turned out in Round One.

Were voters confused and disenfranchised by the new system as opponents warned they would be?  No -- in fact, just the opposite occurred. By all accounts, the rollout of RCV in Minneapolis went extraordinarily smoothly and voters have given it a giant thumbs-up. In a post-election survey conducted by St. Cloud State University, 95 percent of voters reported that RCV was “simple to use,” and the vast majority want to keep it in place.

Beyond the atypical 5th Park Board District race (they apparently didn’t find outcomes in any of the other 21 races that would support their case), Cilek and Marchetti hype up – once again -- the possibility that voters can help defeat their favorite candidate by voting for them, believing that if they say it often enough people will believe it’s true.

Anomalous example of RCV is also true of traditional runoffs and improbable in real world

To illustrate their claim, Star Tribune commentary editor D.J. Tice presented an example of how a vote can ‘backfire’ under RCV. But what he didn't show was that this same anomalous outcome would be just as likely – if not more likely – under the two-round primary-general election system.

Let’s present the same example under a traditional primary-general election.

In the September primary, voters cast their first preferences:

Tom: 43

Dick: 29

Harry: 28

Tom and Dick advance to the November ballot.

In November, Harry’s voters cast their second preferences in the same way they ranked their second preferences in Tice’s RCV example:

Tom:8

Dick: 20

The final vote in November is:

Tom: 51

Dick: 49

Tom wins.

In an alternate scenario, we’ll speculate, as Tice did, what would happen if two of Dick's supporters in fact supported Tom, giving him more votes in the primary -- but fewer for Dick, so now Dick is eliminated and Tom and Harry advance to the November election. In this election, Dick’s voters, who are more aligned with Harry than Tom, cast all but four of their votes to Harry – and Harry wins with 51 votes.

As in Tice’s RCV example, the two voters who voted for Tom, rather than Dick, in the primary cost Tom the general election he might have otherwise won.

Both examples – highly improbable in real-world elections – show how a voter might unknowingly harm his favorite candidate by ranking that candidate #1 in any voting method that involves the elimination of candidates. This contrived issue is moot, because current primary-general elections have the same flaw. The Minnesota Supreme Court made this point clear in their unanimous 2009 ruling upholding the constitutionality of RCV.

No voting system is perfect, but RCV offers many practical improvements over current system

There is no perfect voting system. Every method has advantages and disadvantages or imperfections. The only real-world way to gauge an electoral reform is to compare its strengths and weaknesses to those of practical alternatives.

RCV offers many improvements over the status quo: it accomplishes, in a single cost-effective election, what current elections accomplish in two. It also provides voters with more choice, increases the number of voters who decide the winners, and eliminates “spoiler” dynamics and “wasted” votes. In sum, under RCV, the outcome more accurately reflects the will of the voters. And here’s another key advantage: RCV provides a clear incentive for candidates to refrain from negative campaigning and stay focused on the issues that matter to voters.

Minneapolis demonstrated that voters can easily and successfully make the transition to a new voting system with proper voter education and a user-friendly ballot design. St. Paul voters will have the opportunity use RCV next year, and Duluth voters may have the chance this year to choose RCV for their future city elections as well.

Undoubtedly, opponents will continue to distort numbers and present anomalous examples to their advantage hoping to confuse voters and thwart election reform. But the more voters understand and have experience using RCV, the more they like it and prefer it over the current system.