ST. LOUIS • Lewis Reed managed to hang on to his job as president of the St. Louis Board of Aldermen with just shy of 36 percent of the vote Tuesday. Two years ago, Mayor Lyda Krewson won with a little less than a third of the vote in a crowded primary field.

The pluralities that propelled them to victory in recent elections have activists launching a petition drive for a new voting system that proponents say will help ensure winners have broader support across the city.

A group called Show Me Integrity is launching a petition drive to gather about 20,000 signatures to make a change to the St. Louis charter instituting “approval voting” in a nonpartisan primary for mayor, aldermen and other city offices. Under that system, recently adopted in Fargo, N.D., voters can cast a vote for as many candidates as they want. The top two vote-winners would advance to a runoff that would replace the general election.

St. Louis is among only a handful of major cities that still uses a partisan system allowing a plurality of voters through a party primary and general election to choose leaders.

“That’s increasingly rare,” said Rob Richie, executive director of FairVote, a Washington-based organization that advocates for election reform.

Most big cities have election systems established so more consensus can emerge from a crowded field. Chicago is gearing up for a runoff election with the top two vote winners after whittling down a field of 14 candidates in February. Next month, Kansas City’s nonpartisan mayoral primary will send the two top candidates out of a field of 11 to a June matchup. Closer to home, Maplewood and Richmond Heights hold runoff votes if candidates don’t receive a majority.

Philadelphia, Baltimore and Washington are among the cities that still hold Democratic primaries that tend to elect their mayors, Richie said. New York’s Democratic primary triggers a runoff if any candidate fails to get more than 40 percent of the vote. Like St. Louis, a heavily Democratic electorate in those big cities means the Democratic Party Primary has become the de facto general election, allowing candidates in a crowded field to win with less than a majority.

“Either the runoff or the ranked choice voting systems, one of the arguments that proponents frequently make is it helps ensure you have a winner that’s supported a majority of voters,” said David Kimball, a professor of political science at the University of Missouri-St. Louis who studies elections and voting. “The theory is having a winner who’s supported by the majority of voters is more likely to enact policies supported by a majority of the voters.”

Benjamin Singer, who helped run the successful Clean Missouri state amendment that passed in November and changed campaign finance and legislative redistricting rules, is part of the group pushing the effort. It’s also being backed by former St. Louis Mayor Vincent C. Schoemehl Jr., who endorsed aldermanic president Candidate Megan Green, and St. Louis Treasurer Tishaura Jones, who came just a few hundred votes behind Krewson in the 2017 mayoral election. Jones supported aldermanic president candidate Jamilah Nasheed in Tuesday’s election.

With approval voting, Singer said, people don’t have to strategically vote for the candidate they view as most likely to win over their favorite. They can cast votes for multiple candidates, reducing the spoiler effect that can swing elections to those without broad support. He said he doesn’t think getting the signatures necessary to get the question on a ballot in the coming months will be an obstacle.

“It just seems like there’s so much energy around this right now,” Singer said. “We’re optimistic the people of St. Louis are going to step forward to fix their broken election system.”

Related Lewis Reed won just 5 wards, but high turnout there pushed him to victory He won the Democratic primary for St. Louis President of Board of Aldermen in a close race with state Sen. Jamilah Nasheed and Alderman Megan Ellyia Green.

One of the losing camps clearly thought split votes had an effect Tuesday. Behind Reed’s 35.6 percent was Nasheed with 31.6 percent and Green with 31.2 percent. On election night, Nasheed said “fake progressives got in the way of progress.” On Twitter, one of her campaign operatives, Winston Calvert, invoked Ralph Nader, who likely took enough votes from Al Gore to give the 2000 presidential election to George W. Bush.

In St. Louis, split votes weren’t much of an issue during the Francis Slay era. He consistently racked up majorities in the Democratic primary. There have been past mayors and board presidents who won without majorities. But the last time it happened, Freeman Bosley Jr., who won a four-way race for mayor in 1993, and Francis Slay, who won a seven-way primary for board president in 1995, each managed to get around 45 percent of the vote.

When Maine changed its election method in 2016, it followed a series of elections where winning candidates won less than a majority of the vote, Kimball said.

“Having repeated elections like this is one condition that seems to lead more people to look for alternative rules that might ensure a more majority winner,” he said. “It really depends more on which side thinks they’re getting the short end of the current rules and wants a change. So I don’t expect Mayor Krewson or Lewis Reed to be clamoring for a change in voting rules in the city any time soon.”

Indeed, St. Louis’ election laws are actually governed by ordinance via its charter. So the Board of Aldermen and a mayoral signature are all that’s needed to adopt a new system.

Green called for ranked-choice voting in her concession speech Tuesday night. Cities such as Minneapolis, San Francisco and Oakland have instituted ranked choice voting, sometimes called instant runoff, that lets voters rank their preferences and avoids the expense of a second election.

“It may well still have been Lewis Reed that got a majority if there was a runoff system,” Green said. “But just from a governance standpoint, being able to have that closure and being able to say over 50 percent of the voters in the city agree with the viewpoints of a particular candidate is important for our democracy.”

A petition to amend the charter to institute ranked-choice voting had actually been circulating around the city over the last year.

But there is a practical problem with ranked-choice voting.

“If more debate is generated as a result of the election in St. Louis City, for election administrators, the more pressing concern is, can the voting machines actually do it?” said Eric Fey, the Democratic St. Louis County director of elections and an international election observer and expert. “In the case of St. Louis and St. Louis County, the answer is no.”

That’s why the Show Me Integrity group decided to change its approach after the election this week. Among the top practical benefits of approval voting is that it can be instituted using the existing equipment in St. Louis.

Kimball said approval voting, developed by a political scientist about 30 years ago, hasn’t been instituted in many government elections, so there’s little study of its practical effects. But in theory, it should push candidates to appeal to the electorates of other candidates in an attempt to win over their approval. That could lead to less mudslinging and, possibly, more of a focus on the issues.

“If you want to be marked as acceptable, then try to appeal to as many voters as you can, which probably means not attacking all of your opponents,” he said.

Of course, if Missouri voters approve the Better Together plan to merge the city and county in November 2020, the effort could be a moot point.