Residents of Minneapolis, MN will vote this November 7 on whether or not to use instant-runoff balloting in Minneapolis city elections. Here's how it works:

Let's say there are 5 candidates (we'll call them Alice, Ben, Cathy, Dave, and Emily) in the race for Mayor of Minneapolis. Each voter ranks his/her top 3 candidates in order--first choice, second choice, third choice.

First we look at all the first-choice votes. Let's say 52% of voters listed Alice as their first-choice vote. Then Alice wins the election--no instant-runoff is necessary.
But now let's say that no candidate gets a majority (meaning more than half) of the first place votes. (In a race with 5 candidates, this is pretty likely.) Let's suppose that Alice gets 41%, Ben gets 37%, Cathy 12%, Dave 9% and Emily 1%.

Well, Emily got the fewest votes, so she's out of the race, and the few votes that she received are distributed among other candidates. Basically, we cross her name off all the ballots and then look at the new highest finisher on all the ballots. Let's say that half of Emily's supporters said Alice was second-best and half said Dave was second-best. (Remember Emily won 1%, so Alice picks up 0.5% and so does Dave.) So now the election totals are: Alice 41.5%, Ben 37%, Cathy 12%, Dave 9.5%.

But still no one has won the majority. Now Dave's out, so we cross his name out on all the ballots and look at the new highest finisher on all the ballots. (Remember, some of those already had Emily's name crossed out. Probably some others originally had Dave first and Emily second, but Emily's been crossed out already so we'd move to the third-choice in those instances.)

So we redistribute Dave's votes. Let's say Alice picks up another 6%, Ben picks up 3%, and Cathy picks up 0.5%. Well, now Alice has 47.5%, Ben has 40%, and Cathy 12.5%.

OK, so we cross out Cathy's name everywhere. It gets a little weird here, because now some of the ballots are totally empty: someone whose 1-2-3 choices were Cathy-Dave-Emily (in any order) now has no candidates left to vote for. I guess these ballots don't count now, since they've expressed no preference between the only two candidates still standing (Alice and Ben)--basically, these ballots said that they don't want either candidate. Oh well, not everyone can get their wish all the time.

And just to make things completely weird, let's say that Alice picks up only 1% from Cathy's votes, and Ben gets 10.5% (and the other 1% that Cathy won are empty by now). So now we've got Alice with 48.5%, and Ben with 50.5% (and 1% were empty), so Ben wins.

In this example, Alice had more first-choice support (41% to 37%) than Ben, indicating that more people felt strongly that Alice should win. However, a majority (50.5%) believed that Ben was a better candidate than Alice, so he ended up getting the nod. (Note: if neither candidate had gotten a majority, like if all of Cathy's ballots had turned out to be empty, then I guess the one with fewer votes would drop out like before--and presumably, once there is only one candidate, that person wins.)

I think that if Minneapolis goes to this system of voting, third- and fourth-party candidates will get more votes, and people will feel more freedom to vote for the candidate they truly like (rather than for the candidate that they think has the best chance to win). Most voters would probably see this as a positive. On the other hand, opponents say the plan is (a) expensive, (b) untested, and (c) confusing for voters.

The city estimates (according to an article in the StarTribune) that it would cost $1.8 million to implement the plan. That breaks down to about $5 for each of the city's 382,000 residents. Personally, I'd pay the extra $5 to see us try it out, but I know not everyone would. As for the plan being untested--according to the article above, 3 U.S. cities plus Ireland, Australia and London have similar systems. So it's new but not totally unheard-of.

But they're right that it is somewhat confusing. Well, at least at first--like every new idea.