Bloomington's First Ranked-Choice Voting Election is a Success
The first Ranked Choice Voting election in Bloomington is complete and was a huge success!
Election Winners
District 3 City Council
Lona Dallessandro won with a majority of first-choice votes (51.66%).
District 4 City Council
Patrick Martin won in round 2 with 56.66% of the votes. Because no candidate earned a majority of first-choice votes (50%+1), write-ins and candidates who could not mathematically win (Angella Coil and Becky Strohmeier) were eliminated from the race. Voters who had selected any of those eliminated candidates as their first-choice had their vote transferred to their second-choice. Martin received about 1/3 of the transferred second-choice votes.
At-Large City Council
Nathan Coulter won in round 2 with 56.496% of the votes. Because no candidate earned a majority of first-choice votes, any ballot that had Ric Oliva or a write-in as a first choice had their vote transferred to their second-choice. Of the transferred votes, about 38% went to Coulter.
More Details
The election results will become official at 5:30pm on Wed., 11/10, when the City Canvassing Board will canvass the results in the Council Chambers. The oath of office takes place Jan. 3, 2022.
Detailed results on the city’s website: https://www.bloomingtonmn.gov/cl/election-results
Ranked Choice Voting Wins
Instead of having an expensive, low-turnout primary in the summer, voters only had to go to the polls once and were able to fully express their preferences among the entire slate of diverse candidates.
Voters didn’t have to worry about spoilers or wasted votes.
Our local races had a broader spectrum of political diversity, and like-minded candidates supported each other.
More than half of the candidates were women or people of color.
We now have two women on the Council, and elected our first-ever openly gay city council member.
The runoff process demonstrated that all three winning candidates received a majority of voter support.
On Election Day, we conducted exit polling at several voting locations, and voters of all ages and backgrounds found ranking candidates to be easy.
While the results were delayed because Bloomington chose to use the hand count tabulation process over the spreadsheet method used in all other RCV cities in Hennepin County, the physical process of hand counting helped the public visualize how the ballots get counted and reallocated under RCV. Hopefully, Bloomington will use the spreadsheet method (or better yet, certified software) in future elections, so we can have results much faster, as was the case in Minnetonka, St. Louis Park, and Minneapolis.