Ranked-Choice Voting Helped Wreck Minneapolis

Minneapolis was once known for its innovative and progressive policy solutions. It produced national political leaders such as Hubert H. Humphrey and Walter Mondale. In the past year, however, Minneapolis has become better known as a badly managed city adrift in politically correct mob rule. How did this once-great city fall so far so fast?

In 2009, Minneapolis adopted ranked-choice voting, then an untested method of electing city officials. It was sold to voters as a way to increase voter participation and improve the tone of political campaigns. In fact, it has had little positive effect on campaigns and their messaging, and voter turnout remains low. The corrosive effect of ranked-choice voting on democratic legitimacy is partly to blame for Minneapolis’s current dire condition.

In Minneapolis’s 2017 mayoral election (which was the third using ranked choice) voter turnout was only 43%. The victor in that 16-way race was Jacob Frey, who prevailed after six rounds of counting that took 24 hours to complete. He became mayor despite being the first choice of only 25% of voters.

Mr. Frey’s most notable first-term achievement was doing nothing last May while rioters burned and looted more than 1,300 buildings, causing an estimated $500 million of damage. He implied that destroying the city was a justifiable social-justice action. When a police precinct was burned to the ground, he showed no special concern. He did make time for a live television interview on MSNBC.

Minneapolis has become a city adrift, run by weak leaders like Mr. Frey. The best any of them can do is keep the mob at bay—and sometimes not even that. On June 27 a crowd that included members of Black Lives Matter and Twin Cities Coalition for Justice 4 Jamar, surrounded a City Council member’s car and held her captive until she signed a paper with a list of their demands.7
 
Public confidence in elections matters. When voters develop doubts about election integrity, they begin to question whether public officials are wielding power legitimately. Ranked-choice voting remains a solution in search of a problem, as a new Freedom Foundation of Minnesota report explains. It replaces the traditional plurality voting system to which most Americans are accustomed with a scheme that denies voters informed choice without ensuring that every vote counts. Ranked choice creates needless complexity that makes voting less, not more, accessible.

Despite what advocates say, ranked-choice voting doesn’t combat voter apathy—competitive races that engage a broad swath of the electorate do. If advocates truly want greater voter engagement and turnout, they would allow nonpartisan municipal elections to occur during midterm election years, when federal and (in most places) state offices are also contested.

New York is the latest city to learn the hard way how bad ranked-choice voting can be. It took 15 days for a winner to emerge in the city’s Democratic primary for mayor. New Yorkers have also learned that ranked-choice voting actually reduces voter confidence and satisfaction—even as both are already extremely low.

In a 2017 study, political scientist Lindsay Nielson found that ranked-choice voting has “no positive impact on voters’ confidence in elections and the democratic progress.” Overall, Ms. Nielson’s survey respondents “were not any more likely to prefer RCV elections to plurality or majoritarian elections, and, overall, most voters do not prefer to vote in RCV elections and do not think that they result in fair election outcomes.”

After 11 years, most Minneapolis voters don’t have a great handle on how ranked-choice voting works. Progressive political power brokers seem to be the only ones informed about its mechanics and why it’s supposedly preferential to the one-person, one-vote system that worked well for so long. Advocates never mention the most disturbing fact about ranked-choice voting—sometimes your vote doesn’t count in determining the winner. Under ranked-choice voting candidates are eliminated in rounds. The votes of eliminated candidates are redistributed according to the voter’s ranked preferences. Ballots on which only one candidate is ranked first are pushed aside when that candidate is eliminated. In the New York Democratic mayoral primary nearly 140,000 ballots ended up being declared “inactive,” about 15% of the total.

“In the end, it is all about political power, not about what is best for the American people and preserving our great republic,” according to a 2019 Heritage Foundation report. “So-called reformers want to change process rules so they can manipulate election outcomes to obtain power.”

Minneapolis has learned a painful lesson about the connection between democratic legitimacy and public order. Let’s hope it isn’t too late to turn things around. Scrapping ranked-choice voting would be a step in the right direction.

Mr. Weber, a Republican, served as a U.S. representative from Minnesota, 1981-93. Ms. Meeks is president and CEO of the Freedom Foundation of Minnesota, where Mr. Weber is a board member.  This article appeared in the July 10th edition of the Wall Street Journal. 

You can read the Freedom Foundation of MN report on ranked choice voting HERE.