How does ranked-choice voting work?

Voters in Minneapolis, St. Paul, St. Louis Park, Bloomington and Minnetonka are able to choose several candidates for one office in order of preference — a process called ranked-choice voting. Minneapolis and St. Paul have been using the system for many city offices since 2009, and several suburbs have switched more recently.

In Minneapolis, voters can rank three candidates for each office. Minneapolis voters will rank their choices for mayor, City Council, Board of Estimate and Taxation, and the Park and Recreation Board.

In St. Paul, voters can rank up to six candidates. Only the mayor is up for election this fall, and there are five candidates running.

If a single candidate captures more than 50% of first-choice votes, they win outright, similar to the simple plurality system of other elections.

This has happened in every St. Paul’s mayoral election since 2009, when the system was implemented there — a single candidate garnered a majority of first-choice votes and won.

But every mayoral election in Minneapolis with ranked-choice voting has gone to multiple rounds of vote reallocation, also called “instant runoff.”

It’s impossible to predict what will happen on election night.

Three candidates in Minneapolis’ mayoral race — DeWayne Davis, Omar Fateh and Jazz Hampton — are running as a coalition, encouraging their voters to rank all three of them instead of Mayor Jacob Frey. The strategy intends to leverage ranked-choice voting’s process of vote reallocation. By not ranking a candidate, voters can make sure that candidate does not receive any votes through reallocation.

Neither Minneapolis or St. Paul will reallocate votes on election night. Unless voters elect a majority candidate in first-choice votes — 50% of the vote plus 1 — we won’t know the outcome of the race until following days.