St. Paul voters cast ranked-choice elections into murky waters

On Tuesday, St. Paul voters approved a referendum that will switch local odd-year elections to even years to coincide with elections for wider offices, on the premise that such a move will increase voter turnout for local races. 

Opponents of the change, however, claim it means ranked-choice voting could now be eliminated for those local races. 

How likely is that?

St. Paul, like other cities, has ranked-choice voting for city council seats and other local positions, unlike non-local races generally held on even years, such as those on the ballot for Tuesday’s general election. Now, with local elections moved to even years, election officials will either have to produce two sets of ballots or a single ballot that contains both traditional voting for one set of candidates and ranked choice voting for others. Additionally, because of conflicting state laws, it is unclear if the city could have two second-page ballots. 

Peter Butler, a longtime advocate for St. Paul elections moving to even years, said there is no law “expressly” prohibiting ranked-choice voting on even-year elections, though the “laws are a little inconsistent and in conflict.”

A law concerning optical scanning equipment, the most commonly used election tabulation tool, says only a single ballot card can be used, Butler said. But Butler said it doesn’t completely eliminate the ability for ranked-choice voting to be included on even years; it just makes it more difficult to do so. A 2017 report by a Minneapolis city attorney also outlined this paradoxical nature of current law, concluding it would be particularly difficult to have ranked-choice voting on even years. 

“Some of the law says it’s OK to go to a second page and then you have this optical scanner law that says you can only have a single page,” he said. 

This legal gray area could be remedied if St. Paul moved to the latest touch screen technology on the market for polling places, Butler added. He also sent a timeline of even-year election efforts in the United States to MinnPost, including the 2022 even-year election for mayor and city council in Los Angeles, which reached “some 43%” of the 2.1 million registered voters, as compared to prior Los Angeles city elections that had lower turnout. Karen Bass, the first Black woman to be elected mayor of Los Angeles, was elected in this even-year race. 

But opponents of the ballot measure have said it puts additional strains on election infrastructure without dedicated funding to ensure voter access.  

City Council President Mitra Jalali was one of these opponents. She said there are myriad policy issues to contend with now that it has passed. 

“It’s not good for (the) voters that you say you’re trying to help,” Jalali said. “I just think these are things that, frankly, they just did not contemplate. They were like, ‘Wouldn’t it be nice if so many more people voted in local elections? All you have to do is change the year.’ Well it turns out there are a whole lot of issues with that operationally.”

State Rep. Liz Lee, DFL-St. Paul, also opposed the ballot questions. She believes local candidates will have a harder time getting their message out over the din of national and gubernatorial elections. 

“Unfortunately, that means we have to work even harder to help folks understand what they’re voting for,” she said. “I also worry that new folks voted ‘yes’ for this but also weren’t sure what they were voting for.” 

For Butler, the timing of when this initiative went to voters was intentional after lessons learned from his first attempt. 

The first effort Butler made to change these election years was in 2016 in response to the city having one of its lowest odd-year election turnouts in 2015. Only around 30,000 people voted. He noted that turnout hasn’t been as low in the most recent odd-year elections, which he attributed to prominent ballot initiatives that spurred voters to go to the polls, including a trash collection initiative in 2019 and rent control in 2021. 

“But in 2015 we had some seriously low turnout and I thought, ‘This is kind of ridiculous,’” he said. “Nobody shows up. We have an election every year in St. Paul. It’s city elections on odd years and state and federal elections on even years. Why don’t we just combine them?”

In 2016, Butler was unable to get enough signatures to get the referendum on the ballot. He then committed to doing it again and decided 2024 would be the time to do it, based on the number of signatures needed to place a referendum on a ballot. 

“That way, you’re presenting the question to the highest turnout and the number of signatures is based on 5% of the last even-year election. So it was based on 2022, so that was about 5,500. It could have been based on 2020, but that would’ve been 7,700. So I had to wait a couple years to get the lower number.”

Winter Keefer

Winter Keefer is MinnPost’s Metro reporter. Follow her on Twitter or email her at wkeefer@minnpost.com.

Deanna Pistono

Deanna Pistono is MinnPost’s Race & Health Equity fellow. Follow her on Twitter @deannapistono or email her at dpistono@minnpost.com.

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