Bloomington starts hand counting ranked-choice ballots

Bloomington election officials started counting ranked-choice voting ballots by hand Thursday, a manual process that could drag into the weekend to call winners in two remaining City Council races.

Newcomer Lona Dallessandro was declared the winner of the District 3 council seat Thursday afternoon after about six hours of counting.

No council candidate received the necessary 50% plus one first-choice votes on Tuesday night, setting into motion the hand tabulation by 22 election judges. It's the first time Bloomington, the fourth-largest city in the state, used ranked-choice voting. To instill trust in this new process, the city opened tabulation to the public at Civic Plaza.

"We must remain patient," said Sharon Billings, campaign manager for at-large incumbent Nathan Coulter, as she sat watching each ballot pass from one election judge to the next.

Billings sat beside Laurie Aho, campaign manager for District 4 incumbent Patrick Martin, and Erik Wakefield, a volunteer for Dallessandro's campaign.

Wakefield said while the hand-counting process was very calm, organized and methodical, he'd love to see some technology put to use. "I think we could definitely get in the 21st century," he said.

City Clerk Christina Scipioni said election judges were hoping to wrap up the District 4 race Friday and jump into counting the at-large race that should finish by Saturday.

St. Paul is the only other Minnesota city tabulating ranked-choice ballots by hand, overseen by Ramsey County. County Elections Manager David Triplett said cities can only use tabulation software certified by the Secretary of State's Office. Software like the RCV Universal Tabulator to quickly generate ranked-choice results exists, but no RCV tabulation software is certified in Minnesota, Triplett said, "thus the hand tabulation. So, not many routes to choose."

The Secretary of State's Office notes there's no state law governing RCV, since cities have adopted it through their charters. A proposal at the Legislature includes standards for tabulation, and if passed, the office could use those standards to certify software.

Jeanne Massey, executive director of the ranked-choice voting advocacy group FairVote Minnesota, said hand counting of RCV ballots shouldn't be happening in 2021. But she notes that the five cities across the state using the voting process have only two options: hand count or what's called the "Minneapolis method," a tabulation process created by the first Minnesota city to use ranked-choice voting. It's also a manual process, but it relies on computer spreadsheets to get results much faster.

"Both approaches are highly transparent and highly accurate, just one is more tedious and slow," Massey said

Minnetonka used RCV for the first time Tuesday as well, but the west metro city already has election results. That's because Minnetonka went with the Minneapolis method, which is also used in St. Louis Park.

Massey hopes the software certification issue will be resolved before the next election. Minneapolis applied for experimental certification and tested the Universal Tabulator this year, she said, alongside the traditional spreadsheets the city has used since it rolled out ranked-choice voting in 2009.

"We've had ranked-choice voting for over a decade, but here we are," Massey said.

Bloomington could have gone the Minneapolis route rather than follow the slower lead of St. Paul. But Scipioni said for the city's first go with ranked-choice, they decided to hand tabulate to make the process more transparent for first-time ranked-choice voters.

"We really wanted residents to be able to see the full process," Scipioni said.

She said that it's  a "tricky situation" because the most efficient tabulation method isn't certified in the state. "We're stuck in this gray area where we can't use the fastest method that's available," she said.

Bloomington will evaluate the tabulation process and consider changes for the next election.

"We'll just keep improving and making this work even better each year," she added.

Election result updates will be posted on the city's website and the public is welcome to watch through the weekend, with counting starting each day at 9 a.m. and wrapping up by 5 p.m.

Wakefield said while the process is both tedious and full of anticipation, there are clear advantages to manually counting the ballots in front of the public.

"There's not machines magically doing it behind the curtain," he said. "So there shouldn't be any questions of accuracy, because it's all being done in the wide open."

Massey said once City Council winners are declared in Bloomington, voters will quickly forget how long it took to count.

"If you could do it in a speedier way, my personal opinion is they consider that for the next go round," she said.

Staff writer Briana Bierschbach contributed to this report.

Kim Hyatt • 612-673-4751