Minneapolis mayoral election final results

[arkuat]

So the final percentages are: Betsy Hodges 48.95%, Mark Andrew 31.44%, exhausted ballots 19.61%.

A clean win, but not the guaranteed over 50% win that some people were promising even though we were only planning to count three choices for each voter.

Exhausted ballots in this case means everyone who voted for at least one person for mayor, but picked neither Hodges nor Andrew with any of their three choices. In an election in which as many rankings are allowed as there are candidates, "exhausted ballots" means ballots cast by people who didn't finish filling out the ballot before casting it. I know it's not really why they call them that, but it's funny to think of people getting exhausted with representative democracy before they get to the bottom of the ballot, and calling it a day.

Now I'm curious to see how Cano and Yang will be faring tomorrow in the final count of the City Council votes. There's one other Council election with a non-obvious outcome, but it's in a neighborhood that I'm much less familiar with than Cano's and Yang's, so I hadn't been following it.

Comments

[quadong.livejournal.com]

Unless you force everyone to rank every candidate, you can never promise that the winner in IRV will have 50% in the final count. (That's still true, of course, if the options are ranking everyone or ranking no one, with the latter not used in calculating the 50%.) You can only promise that they will have 50% of the non-exhausted ballots. Using that as the denominator might be a better way of presenting the result.

[arkuat]

Sure, and I think it's a mistake to throw away incomplete ballots as "spoiled", as is done in some jurisdictions, but allowing only three rankings in a field of 35 candidates is just setting yourself up for a large exhausted ballot count.

This wouldn't be so bad if people hadn't been promoting RCV by claiming, inaccurately, that it would guarantee that definite majority. That claim is generally inaccurate, as you point out, but I've seen rhetoric used to defend the three-votes-only RCV that we've implemented here as if it were identical to everyone-ranks-all-voters RCV, and I think that sort of rhetoric was a mistake that has wound up doing the reform more harm than good. This thing could still get repealed if we're not careful.

[quadong.livejournal.com]

See, it guarantees a definite majority as long as the speaker is free to define "definite majority". Since there's no quick slogan that includes the definition, I think the talking point should be that it acts like a [series of] runoff election[s], but is cheaper while also making sure that all the same voters are present in each round, instead of only the small set of people who show up to primaries.

[jinian.livejournal.com]

I like "exhausted ballots" too.

[arkuat]

:-)