Ranked Choice Voting on November Ballot in Duluth

Duluth Voters to Decide on Ranked Choice Voting

Duluth voters will be heading to the polls in November to decide whether they want to change the way they vote. 

The Duluth Better Ballot Campaign, a diverse coalition of citizen activists, community leaders, elected officials, the UMD chapter of MPIRG and others, is pushing for voters to adopt a ranked choice method of voting.

They needed to get 1,606 signatures on a petition to have it on the ballot this fall and got 2,036.

Those signatures have been validated by Duluth’s City Clerk, Jeff Cox.

Now the group is officially kicking off a Vote Yes for RCV initiative with a citywide campaign to educate voters about RCV’s benefits.

Ranked Choice Voting allows voters to rank candidates on the ballot according to their preferences: first choice, second choice, third choice, etc.

Voters cast their vote for their favorite candidate knowing that if he or she doesn’t gather enough votes to win, their ballot will count toward their second choice.

In a single-winner election, votes cast for the least popular candidate are not “wasted,” but rather redistributed to more popular candidates, based on the voters’ second choices, until the candidate with the broadest support wins.

In the two-seat at-large elections, rounds of counting continue until both seats are filled.

Currently voters take part in traditional two-round elections with a September primary and a November general election. 

If Duluth adopts ranked choice voting it would be the third Minnesota Community to do so.