Making the case for IRV

By Lori Sturdevant

Last update: September 16, 2009 - 4:07 PM

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The miserable 5 percent turnout in Tuesday's primary election in St. Paul nicely helps advocates of instant runoff voting in city elections make their case. Low-visibiity city primary elections often produce turnout so low that they cannot be claimed to produce results that reliably reflect majority opinion.

St. Paul voters will be asked on Nov. 3 whether they want to follow the lead of Minneapolis, scrap their primary and conduct a single election using the ranked-choice method that instant runoff voting allows. If the Nov. 3 voters who stayed away from the polls on Tuesday did so out of a sense that primaries ought to be obsolete, instant runoff voting looks like a shoe-in in St. Paul.

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