Does Ranked Choice Voting Cost More?

Some Ranked Choice Voting (RCV) opponents are making baseless claims that RCV will cost 5x more than the current primary-general election system in Bloomington. These claims are simply incorrect.

MIT Election Lab - Study on RCV Costs

Assuming the best of intentions, this claim could be based on a misunderstanding of a comprehensive study presented at the MIT Election Lab. It reports that cities using RCV have, on average, budgets “5 standard deviations higher” than non-RCV cities -- before, during and after RCV is implemented. To date, RCV has been implemented mostly in large and demographically diverse cities with large election budgets and thus, the budgets in these cities are higher due to the size and makeup of the cities, not because of RCV. Indeed the fact that the budgets are higher even before RCV is implemented negates this spurious claim.

In fact, the MIT Election Lab Study shows that RCV is NOT correlated with an increase of cost in municipal elections: “Differences in election costs during or following RCV implementation are not found to be statistically significant.”

The Facts

So, let’s get a few things straight for policy makers and the public who need to compare apples to apples. 

1. Comparing the first RCV election in Minneapolis to the potential cost of implementing RCV in Bloomington is like comparing apples to steaks. Back in 2009, more than a decade ago, Minneapolis was the first city in Minnesota -- and one of the first in the country -- to implement RCV at a time when RCV voting equipment technology and implementation blueprints did not exist. Minneapolis put them in place and invested in a process -- and in the voters -- to create a successful RCV system. The process was so novel and successful it received an award from the National Association of Election Officials, and the Minneapolis model has become the gold standard for implementing RCV across the country. That standard was used to implement RCV in Maine in 2018, which cost the state just $83,000 (less than $0.08 per voter), according to Maine’s Secretary of State. 

   Since 2009, there have been major improvements in implementation and technology so that cities that adopt RCV now do not have to invest in a new system. According to Minneapolis City Clerk Casey Carl, the cost of elections per voter in Minneapolis have gone down since 2009 because of these improvements. Most significantly, the city manually counted the ballots in 2009. Today, the voting equipment does that task and the city tabulates RCV outcomes using an efficient and transparent spreadsheet system. The time of tabulation has gone from weeks to a day for all races. A typical race takes about an hour to tabulate. 

2. Minneapolis also invested in more voter education and outreach, an investment it decided was worth retaining for every cycle, RCV aside. St. Louis Park has done the same. As both city clerks testified, this is not an expense required to implement RCV, but is instead a value the city places in doing voter outreach and education. Both cities have also partnered with community organizations like FairVote MN, League of Women Voters and GOTV organizations to educate voters about RCV. 

3. Clerk Carl testified to the Minnetonka Charter Commission that the city plans to tabulate results using RCV software starting next year. This means that the cost of tabulation will be significantly reduced as election judges will not be needed the following day to run results using the spreadsheet system. This is an expense the city will save. Bloomington and Minnetonka, which have the same voting equipment, will have the option to follow the same process and save that expense. 

4. Minneapolis and St. Louis Park have a variety of RCV election and educational tools that can be replicated at little or no cost in cities like Bloomington. These include the RCV ordinance, election judge training materials, an explainer video and flyers, sample ballots for mock elections, and translated materials for voters who don’t speak English. 

5. While Bloomington has not yet estimated the cost of running an RCV election, Minnetonka has. It estimates that the cost of the current Primary-General election would cost $101,400 in 2021 and the cost of a RCV election would be $71,700, producing a savings of $29,700. The savings may be greater if the city adopts tabulation software. We would expect that Bloomington would experience similar savings. 

6. Minnetonka has also discussed the possibility of hiring a voter outreach coordinator at an estimated cost of about $100,000. At a recent Minnetonka Charter Commission meeting, interest was expressed for such a role under either the current system or RCV. As stated above, this position is not necessary to effectively implement RCV, but is a role some cities have decided is valuable and included in their elections departments on a permanent basis for all elections. 

Conclusion

It is essential that policy makers and voters have accurate facts about the costs of RCV implementation, and as shown above, it has not led to significant increased costs in RCV cities, and, in fact, should produce cost savings for Bloomington.