Andy Cilek battles for conservative causes-against instant-runoff voting and for photo ID 

Andy Cilek is a right-winger, and he's really busy these days doing all he can to displace the DFL from it position of political leadership in Minnesota. Part of that effort includes stumping for conservative issues near and dear to his heart, from his perch at the St. Paul-based Minnesota Voters Alliance.

[C]ilek will continue the IRV fight by trying to mount legal challenges based on his arguments that IRV has failed to increase voter turnout, to guarantee a majority vote in every race and to increase the number of debates.

Not everyone appreciates Cilek and his approach.

Jeanne Massey, executive director of FairVote Minnesota, which advocates for IRV, says Cilek tends to use “completely fallacious” arguments while trying to convince audiences that IRV is unconstitutional.

“What (the Minnesota Voters Alliance) says about IRV simply isn’t true,” she says.

Cilek’s central premise is that IRV destroys the cherished “one person, one vote” tradition by weighting some votes more than other-and that’s just not accurate, Massey says.

Even if a voter decides to cast a ballot for just one of, say, three candidates that ranked choice carries forward into subsequent rounds, Massey says, no votes are weighted more than others in the IRV system-a point the Minnesota Supreme Court agreed with in its decision that IRV was constitutional.

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