Minneapolis to use new voting system this fall

The Minneapolis City Council has voted to move to ranked choice voting with this fall's municipal election.

The vote was taken Friday in order to reject a measure that would have delayed the implementation if a court decision ruled against it. The Minnesota Supreme Court recently rejected a constitutional challenge to ranked choice voting.

Several council members say the city should wait until next year for the new system, even though city elections staff has been working on implementation since 2007.

Council president Barbara Johnson says elections officials say it could take several weeks, even months to hand count ballots for multiple seat elections, such as for the park board.

"I think we could do this transferable vote for the multi-seat elections if we had machines," she said. "We asked for machines, machines are not available right now. If we waited until the next municipal election we would have machines that would allow us to count those multi-seat elections."

But council member Cam Gordon says waiting for the Court to decide the fate of the new system has been a distraction.

"Now that we have that I think it's clear we need to focus on making sure this election in November is successful," he said. "And the best way to do that is to focus in on the only sensible alternative at this time."