On March 2, 2010, Burlington Voters narrowly and sadly approved a ballot measure to repeal the use of Ranked Choice Voting (or Instant Runoff Voting) for the election of mayor and revert to the former two-round runoff system, which requires winning candidates to capture just 40 percent of the vote and a second, costly and lower turnout second election when no candidate reaches this threshold.

FairVote Minnesota understands that there will always be constant attacks on progressive, democratic electoral reforms from those who want to keep the status quo.

Sometimes these attacks take place to prevent Ranked Choice Voting (RCV) from getting adopted and sometimes they take place after RCV has been adopted and demonstrated to work. Those leading the attacks are often candidates who lose under the new system.

We understand that our challenge in bringing reform to the election system starts with educating people on the benefits of RCV, then getting those measures passed at the local level, and then protecting what we have achieved after the fact. As we have seen throughout the country, politicians who have benefited from the old system will not stop trying to prevent reform, even after reform has taken place.

Their tactics are clear. Try to stop RCV before it is implemented, and if the people pass RCV, then work to get it repealed.  At FairVote Minnesota, our job is to continue to educate people on why this system is working, why people made the right choice in adopting and implementing it in the first place, and expose those who would roll back reform for their own political gain.

Read the national FairVote organization’s Lessons from Burlington for more detail about the repeal of RCV in Burlington.