Bloomington residents decide to keep ranked-choice voting

Bloomington residents decided to keep using ranked-choice voting to select the mayor and City Council.

The city has used ranked-choice voting to select local leaders in the past two elections, but a question on the ballot this year asked if they want to repeal the system. Preliminary election results showed about 51% of voters chose to keep the system.

“We’re thrilled that our city will continue using ranked-choice voting,” said Laura Calbone, with Vote NO on Repeal, a group supported by FairVote Minnesota. Calbone said the system gives voters more choices and can lead to a more inclusive government.

Bloomington is one of five Minnesota cities that use ranked-choice voting to determine the winners of local races, and residents have debated the system’s merits.

Members of Residents for a Better Bloomington, the group that led the repeal effort, argued the method is confusing and undermines voters’ faith in the system.

David Clark, the group’s co-founder said, “We’re disappointed that the repeal did not pass, but from our standpoint, it just points to the outside influence of out-of-state money. It’s a David and Goliath thing.”

He pointed to a late-October donation to the Vote NO on Repeal group from a Maryland-based committee in favor of ranked-choice voting.

Ranked-choice voting replaces the system where candidates would face off first in a primary election, and the winners would then compete in a general election. Instead, voters cast their ballots once and rank their choices.

Under ranked-choice voting, any candidate who receives more than half of the votes in the first round is declared the winner. If no candidate reaches that threshold, the person with the lowest number of votes is eliminated; elections workers then look at the ballots of people who had ranked that person first and instead add their second-choice candidates to the tally. The process continues until a candidate reaches the threshold needed to win.

Both supporters and opponents acknowledge it’s difficult to pinpoint whether ranked-choice voting changed the outcome of Bloomington races, in part because there’s not a definitive way to know who would have won the primary and competed in the general election under the old system. Of the 10 most recent Bloomington races, six were decided in the first round and four were tabulated using ranked-choice voting methods.