Bloomington Determining Rules for Ranked-Choice Voting

Source: Sun Current Bloomington

By Mike Hanks, Community Editor

Bloomington voters have approved the use of ranked-choice voting for municipal elections, and now it’s up to the City Council to define how those ballots will work.

The council discussed questions that will need to be answered in preparation for an ordinance outlining the parameters of a ranked-choice system that will govern city elections beginning this November. Three of seven council seats will be on the ballot – two district seats and one at-large seat – and voters may have more than two choices this fall as there will be no primary election in August.

What happens if six candidates file for one City Council seat? How many choices will voters rank in an attempt to reach a majority vote on any one candidate? How will write-in candidates be handled? Those were all questions the council discussed during its March 1 meeting.

Th ranked-choice system asks voters to rank the candidates in order of preference. If a candidate receives a majority of the votes in the initial tabulation, meaning more than 50%, that candidate wins. If no candidate receives a majority, the candidate with the least number of first-choice votes is eliminated.

Voters who picked the eliminated candidate as their first choice would have their second-choice vote added to the tally of remaining candidates. The process repeats until one candidate has a majority of the votes.

The switch was approved through a City Charter amendment that was on the ballot last fall. The charter amendment needed 51% of the vote to pass, and passed with 51.19%.

The ordinance prescribing the terms of ranked-choice voting falls upon the council, and one of those decision s is to determine how many candidates may be ranked by each voter. If there are six candidates on the ballot, does the city allow voters to rank only three? Some cities allow voters to rank seven candidates in a six-candidate field, presumably to allow for a write-in candidate to be included in the ranking, according to Kris Wilson, Bloomington’s assistant city manager.

Capping the number of choices below the total number of candidates may favorably impact the time required to tabulate the results after the polls close, but allowing voters to rank more candidates means more ballots would remain a part of the tally if multiple rounds of tabulation were needed, Wilson explained. Voters are not, however, required to rank multiple candidates when casting a ballot, she noted.

Councilmember Nathan Coulter was opposed to setting an arbitrary number and having to adjust it after an election if the cap was determined to be optimal for an election. Councilmember Patrick Martin said he was willing to set a cap of three choices for the first election, and adjust the cap if deemed necessary.

What happens if a voter writes in a candidate’s name? There’s a process the city can use that requires a write-in candidate to declare his or her intention to seek a seat, and that would include filing a statement of intention at least a week prior to the election.

If such a requirement were included, write-in votes would not be tabulated if there were no write-in candidates on file. Time would be saved tabulating write-in votes that may be cast for both residents and fictional characters, Wilson explained.

Councilmember Jack Baloga, a Charter Commission member, said the commission had considered the requirement of a write-in candidacy declaration, but the consensus of the commission is that it wanted every resident’s vote to be counted, and he supported that. If there is a complexity to allowing write-in candidates under ranked-choice voting, that should have been indicated to the voting public prior to last fall’s charter amendment question, he said.

If there are five candidates in a race, and the first candidate eliminated in a multi-round tabulation is eliminated by a narrow margin, may that first candidate eliminated request a recount funded by the taxpayers?

Election results are subject to a recount any time a candidate requests one. The cost of a recount is the responsibility of the candidate, unless the margin of victory is less than one-quarter of 1%. The council needs to determine if all candidates who are eliminated by less than one-quarter of 1% are eligible for a publicly funded recount, or if that option is only available to the runner-up, Wilson said.

Any candidate would remain eligible to request a recount, regardless of how it is to be funded, she noted.

The council was scheduled to revisit the discussion prior to a possible public hearing on a ranked-choice voting ordinance, tentatively scheduled for its March 22 meeting.

The filing period for 2021 council races will be later than in past years due to the absence of a primary election. The filing period is July 27 through Aug. 10, and early voting will begin Sept. 17. Election Day is Nov. 2, which will include Bloomington Board of Education seats that will not be subject to ranked-choice voting.

The city’s preparations for its first ranked-choice election will require election judge training, a public information campaign about how the system works and a mock election, Wilson said.

Follow Bloomington community editor Mike Hanks on Twitter at @suncurrent and on Facebook at suncurrentcentral.