Count Our Blessings

Last year, Minneapolis switched to “Instant Runoff” voting.   Under “IRV”, voters list their choices for an office in ranked order.

In exchange for getting slower elections decided by an arcane method that required the last mayoral election to be resolved by a slow, error-prone hand count, the cash-strapped city also got a huge bill. Minneapolis’ first IRV election cost almost $400,000:

A report prepared by Ginny Gelms (PDF), interim assistant city clerk/director of elections, estimates that about one-third of those costs are one-time start-up costs that won’t affect future elections…

…Said the report:

The greatest expenditure was in the area of voter education and outreach, making up 30% of the total amount spent on RCV. A portion of the City’s voter education and outreach program was funded through a grant from the Minneapolis Foundation in the amount of $35,000.

In other words, a third of the costs went to teaching people how to vote.

Teaching people how to vote.

In theory, they won’t need to spend that money again, in theory.  How much do you want to bet?

Hand count expenditures were the next largest, with staffing the hand count at 19% and the costs associated with the hand count facility at 17% of the total RCV cost.

Commenting on the report, Fairvote MN — which led the effort to get IRV in the city — notes that Minneapolis officials are working to acquire IRV-capable voting machines:\

And there’s good news!

The report also indicated that if RCV-capable voting equipment was available in the next election to tally the ballots, costs would be reduced by more than half.

So of the almost $400,000 hike, a third is hypothetically temporary; half the remainder will be saved with new machines; that means elections are going to be $100K-plus more expensive no matter what.

And that’s the good news!

The bad news?

Gelms has said that such equipment may be available within the next three years; the city is working closely with Hennepin County to have RCV-ready voting machines in place by the 2013 election.Such machines are currently used in San Francisco; Cambridge, Massachusetts; and will be used in upcoming November elections in Berkeley, Oakland and San Leandro, California.

And for all of you who worried that Diebold voting machines were going to be jiggered to take control of good ol’ traditional one-person, one-vote elections, you gotta love machines designed to count votes using a system that needs as much explaining as IRV does.

Slower, more expensive, less transparent elections.

Oh, and we get the same thing in “cash-strapped” Saint Paul, now, too!

2 thoughts on “Count Our Blessings

  1. That these things are used in San Francisco, Cambridge and Berkeley is ipso facto reason to abjure them.

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