St. Paul’s mayoral race to be decided by ranked-choice vote — on Election Night – Twin Cities

Voters in St. Paul’s mayoral election can rank all five candidates on Tuesday in order of preference and expect to learn the winner before they go to bed Tuesday night.

After the votes come in for the mayor’s race, Ramsey County Elections will use ballot reallocation software for the first time since the capital city first implemented ranked-choice voting in 2011, guaranteeing same-night results.

“We could not be more excited about this improvement,” said Jeanne Massey, executive director of FairVote Minnesota. “It’s been in use around the country for several years, and had not been approved for use in Minnesota until St. Paul did it first.”

In the past, for certain city council races in which no candidate received 50% of the vote after the first ballot count, the public would have to wait two or three days to learn the outcome as officials gathered on the Thursday after the election to begin a manual ballot count and reallocation process.

In that process, elections workers would eliminate the weakest vote-getter in the race — the candidate with the fewest votes — and physically move their ballots onto stacks of ballots pertaining to the other candidates, based on second-choice picks. After redistribution, they would then do a fresh count to see if anyone had broken 50% of the vote.

The hand count and ballot reallocation process sometimes continued in that fashion for hours and resumed the next day. No St. Paul mayoral election to date has triggered a hand count, but several multi-candidate council races have required reallocation in that manner because no candidate surpassed 50% of the vote on the first ballot.

This year will be different. Ramsey County Elections will use “RCTab” software to reallocate votes Tuesday night, thereby determining an unofficial winner on the same night. The open source software was available free to St. Paul and Ramsey County.

Every ballot generates an electronic cast vote record, or “cvr” digital image, within the machine system, which is then imported into the software. The software creates an auditable report after each round of reallocation, and paper ballots are also preserved and available for audits and recounts.

The cvr data will also be available for review on the Ramsey County Elections website on Election Night.