Bloomington uses ranked-choice voting for city races. Now voters will decide whether to keep it.

Bloomington residents will soon cast ballots to decide how they want to vote in the future for mayor and City Council.

The city has used ranked-choice voting in the past two elections, but in November voters will see a ballot question asking if they want to repeal that system.

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

“It’s an election integrity issue,” said David Clark, the group’s co-founder.

Supporters, meanwhile, say the system gives voters more choices and reduces acrimony in politics.

“There isn’t really any reason to repeal ranked-choice voting,” said Laura Calbone, with Vote No On Repeal, a group supported by FairVote Minnesota, which advocates for the system across the state.

Bloomington is one of five Minnesota cities that use ranked-choice voting to determine the winners of local elections, and residents continue to passionately debate the system’s merits. Ranked-choice voting replaces an old 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.

Top Bloomington city staff say they’re not taking a stance on which method the city should use.

“Whatever the voters choose is what the city is going to report and implement,” said Bloomington City Clerk Jamy Hanson, whose office oversees elections.

The suburb of about 90,000 people adopted ranked-choice voting in 2020. It’s one of a number of cities that have opted to change the way residents vote, including Minneapolis, St. Paul, St. Louis Park and Minnetonka.

But the method remains controversial. The Minnesota House earlier this year rejected a bill that would have allowed more cities to use ranked-choice voting. Minnetonka voters last year voted by a wide margin to continue using the system.

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.

Opponents argue ranked-choice voting was rushed through when voters were distracted by other pressing issues like the COVID-19 pandemic. They say the system is confusing, contributes to voter fatigue, and undermines people’s already fragile faith in the election system. Now, they say, is the time to reevaluate.

“We’ve given everybody the opportunity to really think about it,” said Kathy Kranz, co-founder of Residents for a Better Bloomington, which gathered the signatures needed to get the question on the November ballot that asks if voters want to repeal the system.

Supporters of ranked-choice voting argue the system can help reduce acrimony in politics by giving candidates an incentive to reach out to more voters, including people who might have their opponents’ yard signs sitting outside. They say ranked-choice voting gives residents more choices, improves representation for women and people of color, and reduces overall election costs.

“This is really about giving voters more choice and more power,” Calbone said.