Lori Sturdevant: Decision(s) 2009: Voting goes multiple-choice

Minneapolis voters: Allow extra time for this year's election, the first in the state to employ instant-runoff voting.

I'm not just talking about the time you can expect to spend standing, pen in hand and furrow in brow, puzzling over the newfangled ballot at the polls. Or time beforehand familiarizing yourself with it -- though the more time you devote to the latter, the less you'll need of the former. (Check out www.ci.minneapolis.mn.us/elections, and click on "voting precinct finder" to see your sample ballot.)

The real test of patience for voters who came of age in the instant-gratification era will come after the polls close. Modern-era Minnesotans expect elections to be, at most, 24-hour affairs. You vote by day; you celebrate victory, or mope over defeat, before the next day dawns.

This election won't be like that. It's a low-tech, hand-count affair. At least one winner will be known quickly. Anita Tabb, unopposed in the Park Board's Fourth District, can safely plan her victory party.

A few more winners might be clear early and officially declared within a week or two. The rest?

"We're going to take the time the Legislature allots us" for the certification of results, said interim Minneapolis election director Patrick O'Connor last week.

Translation: results by Dec. 22.

He added: "We will seat all the winning candidates on time."

Translation: by Jan. 4.

It's probably a good thing that this state's voters have recent indelible experience with an election that didn't adhere to the usual 24-hour timeline. The fact that Minnesotans waited almost eight months to know who won a U.S. Senate seat last year without storming the secretary of state's office in protest must be a comfort to O'Connor.

O'Connor, who supervised elections for 15 years as Hennepin County auditor, is in month five of post-retirement service to the city. He's the sort of guy you want in election headquarters when big change is at hand. He knows his business. He's thorough, clever and pragmatic.

Change and challenge don't rattle him. The twinkle in his eyes as he describes what's coming suggests that he's looking forward to it.

Then again, that could be tears.

"Truth be told, I don't know how I feel about [instant runoff] yet," he confessed. "But that doesn't matter. In this office, our motto about instant runoff is, 'It is.' We want to do the very best possible job we can to administer this, so voters can decide whether they like it based on its merits, not how it was implemented."

O'Connor could have said no and changed his phone number when Minneapolis called him in June. Longtime city elections director Cindy Reichert had been lured to Anoka County (where she's less likely to ever again be falsely accused of driving around after an election with undiscovered ballots in her trunk).

She had laid the plans for the city's first instant-runoff election, but wouldn't be on hand to execute them. If O'Connor had not said yes, it might not be happening this year.

"Let's get on with this," he said then. And that's what he says now, even as skeptics insist that the Minneapolis instant-runoff voting experience will be so slow, confusing and unpopular that it will bring the IRV movement to a halt.

O'Connor is on a mission to prove the skeptics wrong. He acknowledges the count will be slow. But the painstaking plans he and his staff (and a consultant) made also call for it to be orderly, transparent and accurate. The deliberate pace of a hand count might help make it so, he says. Because of last year's hand recount, the scene at the city's Harding Street NE warehouse will even look familiar.

Tests have found that IRV isn't confusing for most voters. Neither is counting, when a single seat is at stake.

The city's multiseat board elections are another matter. The process brings to mind the math exams that many students prefer to forget. (Minnesota Public Radio has a great explanatory video that demystifies the multiple-winner IRV process. It's at tiny.cc/JP3Bp.)

But in the hands of veteran election judges and under the watchful eyes of some of the same people who kept vigil at last year's recount, IRV can pass the Minneapolis multiseat test too, O'Connor believes.

That can-do attitude ought to catch on in Minneapolis. Voters: Allow that extra time. Take an early look at the ballot, and read its instructions carefully. Contact O'Connor's office with questions, either via the city's website or its 311 telephone hot line.

IRV will test not only Minneapolis election administration skills, but its residents' citizenship skills as well. It's homework time.

Lori Sturdevant is a Star Tribune editorial writer and columnist. She is at lori.sturdevant@startribune.com.