Minnesota Report
In 2023, FairVoteMN spent over a million dollars ($1,040,000.00) pushing their agenda for Ranked Choice Voting (RCV). This expenditure wasn’t very fruitful, in spite of the fact they had a phalanx of 14 lobbyists, since the legislation failed to provide much of change and did not extend to legislative or statewide elections, which was the purpose.
Last year, Senate President Bobby Jo Champion (DFL-58, Minneapolis) single-highhandedly stymied the legislation and made it a toothless bill, and hopefully he will do so again this session. The report of expenditures will be available June 18th, after the end of the legislative session. Then we’ll see how feckless the effort is this go round.
Needless to say it’s a bad idea, because under the auspices of removing conflict from elections, which is an important aspect, local candidates are poorly scrutinized and because their opponents, news sources and endorsing organizations fail to research the credentials and qualifications of the field. This can and has led to poor candidate selections.
Minnesota is a state known for clean elections and well administered, but if the clarion call made by the political right of election integrity claims, just wait until the system of RCV is in place. When a confusing system, which just doesn’t bear rationale explanation for it existence. It’s advocates claim it will provide electoral majorities, which it doesn’t, provide higher turnout, which it doesn’t and eliminate negative campaigning, which only shifts over to independent expenditures groups.
We have harped about these blatant falsities for years, we have written over 80 articles about RCV, which requires a paid subscription for you to read, but still Jeanne Massey and her zealots keep advancing their bizarre electoral system that has never proven itself, and is a solution in search of a problem. One example is in Bloomington, where initially voters were able to select up to six candidates, then after its first usage, the city council reduced the choices to three. Why because it is nearly impossible after more than three rounds for a candidate to gain a majority, but to once again put forward the mathematical reality of Arrow’s Theorem of Impossibility.