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SANTA FE, N.M. — Though the Santa Fe City Council decided last week to put off ranked-choice voting at least until 2020, there’s a movement afoot to put the new voting method that was approved by the city’s electorate more than nine years ago in place for next March’s municipal elections.

FairVote, a nonpartisan group which, according to its website, works “to make American government more representative of the American people,” is urging the council to reconsider last week’s divided decision against implementing ranked-choice voting in 2018.

The group has allies in the Green Party, which helped push the initiative when 65 percent of city voters in 2008 approved an amendment to the city charter to implement ranked-choice voting, sometimes referred to as “instant runoff,” and Common Cause New Mexico, another independent group that advocates for electoral reform.

“We’re supporting it, but we’re not putting on a full-court press,” said Jim Harrington, state chairman for Common Cause.

But FairVote New Mexico’s state director, Maria Perez, said her group has contacted every city councilor and the mayor about reconsideration. “We’re working hard to make sure this gets back on the table,” she said.

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Sky Tallman, chairman of the Green Party of Santa Fe County, said the party has long advocated for ranked-choice voting. “If we could affect one thing locally, that would be it,” he said.

John Otter, who helped lead the Green Party’s effort to put the charter amendment on the ballot in 2008, has sent an email to all members of the council and the mayor urging them to reconsider last week’s vote. He addressed point by point the concerns brought up during the council meeting when a motion to delay implementation until after 2018 was narrowly approved.

“Ranked-choice voting is so simple,” Otter said in a phone interview. “You put your first choice, your second choice and your third choice. If it’s a good ballot design, there are good instructions on the ballot about how to vote, and you have well trained poll workers, there’s no problem.”

Not everyone agrees.

“What people present as a very simple idea is in fact very complicated in its execution,” says former City Councilor Karen Heldmeyer. “There are many different ways to do ranked-choice voting and I just don’t see how you can do it until you have a completely worked out proposal. And there’s been absolutely no discussion about it.”

With two councilors who potentially could have swung the vote the other way absent from the June 30 meeting, the mayor and the rest of the council spent about an hour in discussion before voting 4-3 to delay implementation, putting off use of ranked-choice voting until at least 2020.

Voting to delay were Councilors Mike Harris, Signe Lindell, Chris Rivera and Ron Trujillo. Their concerns largely centered around timing.

A contractor’s software needed to implement ranked-choice voting has not yet been approved by the independent Voting System Test Lab at the U.S. Election Assistance Commission. It would then require certification by the Secretary of State’s Office. The earliest the software could get through the process is the end of September.

City Clerk Yolanda Vigil, whose office runs elections, told the council she’d prefer having everything in place by Sept. 1, the beginning of the candidate qualifying period for the 2018 municipal election, because candidates expect that the “rules of the game” will be established by then.

Councilor Harris cited a history of missed deadlines by the company developing the software, Dominion Voting Systems, in his motion to delay implementation. Also, some councilors said there should be more time to educate voters about the new method of voting.

Opposing the delay motion were Joseph Maestas, Renee Villarreal and Mayor Javier Gonzales. The mayor said that in the event the software certification failed to come in time, the city could reset the existing, standard election format.

Absent were Councilors Peter Ives and Carmichael Dominguez. Ives said this week that because he missed out on the discussion, he couldn’t say how he would have voted. Dominguez did not return phone messages from the Journal.

New to New Mexico

Had the council decided to move forward, next March’s election at which a mayor and four city councilors will be selected would be the first in New Mexico decided using the ranked-choice voting.

Gonzales has not said whether he’ll run for re-election, while Trujillo has announced his intention to run for mayor in 2018. Trujillo will be vacating his District 4 council seat that will be up for grabs in March, along with those of Dominguez, Lindell and Maestas.

Maestas is one who would like to see ranked-choice voting put back on the table. “At the time we took the vote, we were without two council members,” he said Thursday. “For something as important as a certain kind of voting that’s called for in the city charter, I would support bringing it back and having another vote with all governing body members present.”

Mayor Gonzales said he understands there’s a tight timeline and the burden it would place on the city clerk, “but as long as we can meet the timeline to get it certified prior to our own election resolution, I felt that this is something we should be doing,” he said this week.

He said the official resolution setting the 2018 election won’t come until early October, which would be after the date Secretary of State Maggie Toulouse Oliver has said she expects the software to be certified.

“She has run elections for the past eight years and I don’t think she would communicate they’d have (the software) certified if she didn’t think it could be achieved,” Gonzales said.

He said the state Democratic Party came out in support of ranked-choice voting while he served as state chair, and he recognized then its advantages. “It really is an incredibly important democratic tool, especially the instant runoff aspect to assure whoever gets elected gets in with more than 50 percent of the vote,” he said.

A decade of delays

Heldmeyer is partly responsible for the nearly decade-long delay in implementing ranked-choice voting in Santa Fe. While serving on the City Council when the charter amendment was proposed, she and then-Councilor Matthew Ortiz successfully had language added that said the ranked-choice voting would go into effect during the March 2010 election “or as soon thereafter when equipment and software for tabulating votes and allowing corrections of incorrectly marked, in-person ballots are available at a reasonable cost.”

Back then, the cost estimate was in the range of $250,000. Now, the cost is down to about $39,000, according to Vigil.

Even so, Heldmeyer, who still pays close attention to city government, has concerns about how incorrectly marked ballots would be handled and other aspects of the plan that she says haven’t been sorted out.

“There are several different paradigms for RCV that are used in different places in this country and elsewhere,” she wrote in her own letter to the mayor and council before last week’s vote. “Each of these can result in different final results depending on the submitted ballots. It seems to me that before any testing of the RCV software is attempted for Santa Fe, the city would have to decide which of those paradigms it wants to pursue. This is not a simple matter, one that may take some time to study and decide.”

City Clerk Vigil said she was neither opposed nor in favor of implementation now. She just needed an answer from the City Council on how to proceed. “We want to make sure that when we do it, we’ve got to do it right,” Vigil said.

Generally, and as the name suggests, ranked-choice voting requires voters to rank candidates in order of preference. If no candidate has more than 50 percent of the vote after the first count, the second choices of those who voted for the candidate receiving the least amount of votes are tallied and applied to those candidates’ vote totals. This process is repeated until one candidate receives more than 50 percent of the vote.

Australian example

Ranked-choice voting has been used in Australia for more than a century. About a dozen American cities, including Berkeley, Calif., San Francisco, Minneapolis, and Telluride, Colo., use instant runoff.

A recent study of election methods by the League of Women Voters of Oregon cites research that suggests ranked-choice voting has several benefits. Voters have a wider range of options; the method is strongly resistant to strategic manipulation; it decreases the likelihood of the “spoiler effect,” where an underdog, losing candidate still influences the outcome by taking votes from leading candidates; and makes campaigns more substantive, because candidates are less likely to risk alienating the supporters of their opponents with negative campaigning.

Perez, of FairVote, says ranked-choice voting also can lead to more equitable representation in government by encouraging minorities to run for office. She said many times people of color are reluctant to run because they are afraid of taking votes away from another minority candidate or one that appeals to minority voters.

“Candidates tend not to run because of that,” she said. “With ranked-choice, they don’t have to worry about being spoilers – getting a few votes and then those votes spoiling the election.”

Who’s a spoiler and who’s not is debatable. Some called the Greens’ Ralph Nader a spoiler for possibly tipping the scales of the crucial Florida vote in the 2000 presidential election to Republican George W. Bush by pulling votes from Democrat Al Gore. In New Mexico, Greens were accused of being spoilers in congressional and gubernatorial races won by Republicans in the 1990s.

Otter, of the Green Party, said voters prefer ranked-choice. They can “give a true preference” and “don’t have to vote for the lesser of two evils,” he said.

The method’s drawbacks, according to the LWV of Oregon, include increased time to calculate votes and the need for an election administrator to step in to determine which candidates are eliminated each round. Also, recount procedures are more complicated. There have been instances where a candidate receiving the third most “first place” votes winds up the winner.

Heldmeyer says another concern is what to do with ballots that are “spoiled,” or incorrectly marked. There may be a way to correct a problem at the polling place if the software is capable of catching mistakes, but what of mail-in votes?

She also says it hasn’t been clearly defined how many candidates voters would rank. The top three choices? Top five? All of them?

And there is more than one type of ranked-choice voting method – including rating, range, majority judgment, and approval voting – that needs to be decided, she said.

City Clerk Vigil said how many candidates are ranked could be identified in the election ordinance. She said the software Dominion is developing would allow for up to nine choices.

Otter also cites statistics indicating voter education about ranked-choice voting doesn’t matter much.

He said that in Portland, Maine, the city spent little money on voter education prior to implementing the ranked-choice method in 2011 and 99.83 percent of voters cast valid ballots in an election that included 15 candidates.

Perez agrees with Heldmeyer that up until now there hasn’t been enough discussion about implementing something that was decided by votes nearly a decade ago. She said she found it “disturbing” that there was no opportunity for public comment at last week’s City Council meeting.

“I hope we can get this done,” Perez said. “It’s the law; it’s the will of the people. It’s important that this City Council realizes that they work for the people.”