FARGO - After ballots were counted at a recent meeting of city officials, pepperoni and margherita pizza emerged as the favorites.

What was equally clear was the method used to cast votes mattered.

Using the method the city now uses for electing city commissioners, pepperoni and margherita had the most votes but not a majority.

That could mean the majority actually hated pepperoni and margherita but couldn't agree on anything else. It could also mean those weren't the first picks for the majority, but everyone would still enjoy them.

There was no way to tell and, at any rate, no pizza would be served because the whole thing was an exercise meant to prove a point.

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Jed Limke, who conducted the vote for city commissioners to show how the current method of voting doesn't serve the public well, said the mechanism of elections matter. He said he used pizza to keep politics out of the discussion, but there are real-world political implications.

The meeting last week was convened by a task force commissioners formed to explore ways to improve city elections. Limke is a member. One of the problems it tackled was the one highlighted by the pizza vote: Winners of city elections are frequently minority candidates.

Commissioners Tony Grindberg and John Strand, who won in 2016, had 16 and 15 percent of the vote, respectively. They were the top vote getters in a field of 11 candidates, but their small vote count made them wonder openly what kind of support they and their platforms really had.

"I ran on jobs, growth, safety and infrastructure, and with the percentage of the votes that I got that's not a mandate," Grindberg said. "That's important to me because the voice of the people is why you're running."

The task force found a different method of voting in which it was easier for winners to have a majority. Using that method, pepperoni and margherita were still the winners, but both won with 52 percent of the vote, a majority.

The problem is it's largely untried in government elections, a point noted by the task-force chairman, former Mayor Bruce Furness.

"We can't find anyone that's doing it. We don't really know why," he said, suggesting further research might be warranted.

Avoiding spoilers

Political scientists call the way Fargo and all other local governments elect leaders "plurality voting," meaning the winner is simply the candidate with the most votes even if the winning total is less than half of all votes.

One of the pitfalls of plurality voting is the "spoiler effect" where a candidate that a majority supports loses votes to a candidate who has a similar platform, allowing a minority candidate to prevail, said Mark Johnson, a political scientist at Moorhead's Minnesota State Community and Technical College who advised the task force.

Consider a three-way race among margherita, pepperoni and vegetable lover's pizzas where 60 percent of voters were vegetarian. If 35 percent voted for margherita, a meatless option, and 25 percent for vegetable lover's, that would leave pepperoni the winner with 40 percent, despite the vegetarian majority.

A related pitfall is familiar to voters who have agonized over a candidate they like but is sure to lose, Johnson said. Voters often don't cast their ballots for their preferred candidate in these situations, what political scientists call "strategic voting" or, more vividly, "insincere voting."

Johnson said he considers plurality voting just about the worst method of voting.

That's why Limke thinks "approval voting" is a better way to pick candidates - or pizza, for that matter. The mathematician was drawn to the idea and helped convince a majority of the task force to recommend it.

Approval voting is where voters are asked to reveal all of the candidates they support and, by extension, which they oppose. They can vote for as many as they like.

Consider again the three-way pizza race. If voters could pick more than one pizza, it's possible, for instance, for 40 percent to vote for pepperoni, 50 percent for vegetable lover's and 60 percent for margherita, better reflecting the preferences of a group of mostly vegetarian pizza eaters.

Limke said approval voting also reveals the true support for minority candidates. At the task force meeting, he was surprised to see taco pizza go from 4 percent of the vote in a plurality vote to 36 percent in an approval vote. If taco pizza were a candidate, it would know it has a respectable following, perhaps encouraging it to run again.

And two other pizzas came within striking range of the winners. Meat lover's and supreme pizza both had 20 percent in the plurality vote and 48 percent in the approval vote, meaning they were within one vote of tying with the winners.

Would approval voting have changed results of the last last race?

Johnson, a Fargo resident, said his research shows certain Fargo neighborhoods voted heavily in favor of Strand and Mara Brust, another candidate with similar progressive views. It's possible, he said, that Brust peeled away some of Strand's supporters, reducing the number of votes he received or vice versa.

Limited usage

Of all the alternative methods of voting that might be better than plurality voting, the task force found approval voting was the easiest to implement. Task force members said the ballot counting machines now used by the county need only minor software changes to count approval votes.

They also touted its compatibility with plurality voting. While voters might need to learn how to do approval voting, even if they didn't and continued to vote plurality style, they can do it because approval voting allows voters to pick as many and as few candidates as they want.

Limke said it's also intuitive, noting how groups figuring out when to meet sometimes throw out different times until a majority agrees to a time.

"You've used it, I guarantee it," he said,

No state or local governments are using approval voting, however. Steven Brams, a New York University political scientist who tried to popularize approval voting in the 1980s, said several professional organizations do, such as the Mathematical Association of America. The state of Oregon used it in a school referendum in 1990. The United Nations uses a form of it to pick its secretary general, and it was once used by the Catholic Church to pick a pope. North Dakota lawmakers voted in 1987 to use it in some elections but it only passed in the Senate and not the House.

Johnson said he's looked through political science journals and found only theoretical analysis, not real-world case studies. Other alternatives to plurality voting that might be more complicated than approval voting have found more support because they already are in use by some governments, he said, making other governments more willing to accept them.

For now, approval voting is just one of several recommendations by the task force, including a suggestion to go from a five-member commission to seven members.

Commissioners will consider the options in an upcoming meeting. Using approval voting in city elections would require adding it to the city charter, which requires a citywide vote.