Shawn Towle has thrown his name into the St. Paul mayor’s race, but not as a candidate. Instead of running for office, the DFL political consultant is looking to upend how St. Paul voters will choose the mayor next year.

He’s hoping to force the city to ditch ranked-choice voting, the voter system St. Paul residents approved at the ballot box in 2009.

Towle filed notice with Ramsey County Elections last Friday that he’s forming a political action committee — “St. Paul Votes Smarter” — to repeal ranked-choice voting in St. Paul.

So far, likely committee members include Roy Magnuson, a longtime political voice within the city’s labor circles and a member of the St. Paul Federation of Teachers, as well as Pat Lindgren, who served as a legislative aide to former City Council Member Dave Thune. Related Articles Marchers shut down I-94 through St. Paul to protest Breonna Taylor decision

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Towle, the founder of the “Checks and Balances” political blog, said that ranked-choice voting confuses immigrants and first-time voters and has done little to increase voter turnout.

In fact, he said, declining participation in mayoral and city council elections shows the voting method may have hurt rather than helped, while effectively allowing voters who back fringe candidates to vote multiple times.

“I believe in the fairness principle,” Towle said. “I don’t feel that one person’s vote should have more weight than another.”

HOW IT WORKS

Because the system offers incentive to court rather than demonize a rival candidate’s supporters, advocates for “instant run-off” (IRV) or ranked-choice voting have called it a cure for the vitriol and political grandstanding that so often precedes general elections. Just as importantly, proponents such as FairVote Minnesota have presented IRV as a way to invite more parties — and thus more voters — to the ballot box at a time of declining voter participation.

In St. Paul, which first instituted IRV in 2011, ranked-choice voting eliminates political primaries in city council and mayoral races. Instead, candidates who file for office are almost automatically included on the November ballot, opening the door to third-party — as well as fringe — choices.

“It enabled people like me who have zero campaign experience and name recognition to run a campaign and almost win,” said Jim Ivey, a ranked-choice supporter who ran for St. Paul City Council under the Green Party banner in 2011. “If it wasn’t for ranked choice, I wouldn’t have even been in that election. I would have been eliminated in the August primary.”

The process, however, can be dizzying. In the 2013 mayor’s race in Minneapolis, for instance, more than 30 candidates appeared on the November ballot. So far, former St. Paul City Council Member Melvin Carter III and attorney Tom Goldstein have filed candidate committees in St. Paul’s 2017 mayor’s race, but more candidates are likely to emerge by next November.

On Election Day, voters can vote for multiple candidates, ranked in order of preference. If a voter’s first choice is eliminated for having the fewest votes, ballot counters add their second choice into the vote totals and then add up the ballots again.

The “weakest” candidate, or smallest vote-getter, is eliminated after each round of vote counting. The first candidate to garner more than 50 percent of the vote wins. If no one breaks 50 percent, once two candidates are left standing, the candidate with the most votes wins.

Towle’s strategy to repeal IRV is multi-faceted.

If the St. Paul Votes Smarter PAC can raise enough money, Towle believes it can argue in court that ranked-choice voting violates constitutional protections, not the least of which is that voters will be treated equally under the law. The nation’s highest courts, in various rulings, have upheld the doctrine “one person, one vote.”

Even if his political action committee’s arguments are unsuccessful in court, Towle plans to ask the city’s charter commission to do a formal review of the voting method. Commission member Chuck Repke wants the commission to consider a ballot referendum to repeal it next November.

“It hasn’t done any of the things that proponents said it was going to do,” said Repke.

The St. Paul Votes Smarter PAC’s third approach would be to collect signatures for its own ballot referendum. To get on the city’s November 2017 ballot, a charter amendment petition would need at least 7,011 signatures and must be submitted to the county no later than July 11.

TURNOUT LOWER

In Ramsey County, elections officials say fewer and fewer voters are heading to the polls to decide city council races and other municipal elections, though presidential elections are the exception: They tend to bring out political diehards and first-time voters alike.

In 2013, the city’s first test of the ranked-choice system in a mayoral race, St. Paul Mayor Chris Coleman won a third term by a landslide, but turnout was the lowest in at least 30 years for a mayoral election. In November 2015, fewer than 28,000 voters went to the polls to choose the seven-member St. Paul City Council by ranked choice, which was again the lowest turnout in decades.

In St. Paul, school board races, county and judicial seats, statewide offices, and congressional seats are not determined by ranked choice, and neither are presidential elections. On Nov. 8, turnout for the historic match-up of Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton and Republican nominee Donald Trump was historically robust for St. Paul.

“The total voting in the city this year was 140,210, which was the third-highest number of persons voting in St. Paul in the last quarter century,” said Ramsey County Elections Manager Joseph Mansky.

As of Election Day, there were 159,116 registered voters in St. Paul, comprising 52 percent of the registered voters in Ramsey County.

Jeanne Massey, executive director of FairVote Minnesota, said many St. Paul voters stayed home in 2013 because Coleman was a well-established incumbent with weak challengers.

“The race to watch is going to be the one coming up in 2017,” said Massey, who pointed to select council races as relative successes. “Where there were competitive races in 2011, 2013 and 2015, turnout was up.”