This fall, Saint Paul is going to have a referendum authorizing Instant Run-off Voting (IRV) for municipal elections on the ballot. Under this proposal, choices in an election would be ranked, rather than simply selected, and in successive rounds candidates with fewer votes can be dropped off and the votes allocated to the voters’ second or third choices.

Systems like this have been proposed in many places across the USofA recently in order to give third parties and alternative issues a better chance in an election, so I hope this essay generalizes to other places. As for IRV, I’ve always been deeply agnostic about the proposal, but like it less the more I think it over.

In Saint Paul, we have non-partisan municipal elections. The September primary is open to anyone, and the top two from that go on to the November general election regardless of party. It’s hard to see how you could come up with a more fair system, and I’d like to make all elections non-partisan; voting for a third party is perfectly reasonable when you know that the top two remain viable. But that’s not good enough for a lot of people in this town.

Why?

I honestly don’t know why. There is a belief that somehow an IRV system will make it even more likely that people will support candidates not from the one major party, the DFL (Democratic Farmer-Labor). That belief seems to be based on naivet� and a complete lack of understanding that an election is not an event, but a process.

In this town, the DFL dominates. There is no real functioning Republican party, and in the last two presidential elections not a single precinct went for Bush. There are generally two types of municipal elections, based on who survives the September primary – DFL versus DFL-lite, and DFL versus not-DFL. The DFL-lite candidates are the ones who seem like DFLers but were not endorsed by the party; these candidates often are running on a single issue or against the party as an Old Boyz club. The not-DFLers should be called Republicans, and would in any other town, but they are looking for crossover appeal. Through the last few elections, the DFL gained 6 of the 7 council seats and Mayor’s office for their endorsed candidates, the remaining one, Bostrom, came from an election in which there was no endorsement.

How will a new voting system change this?

There is no doubt that our local politics is rather stale and clubby. You don’t have to see much more than our election results to realize that. When you think about the grinding process of running a campaign, however, it gets even more entrenched. The process of gaining supporters is done door to door in this town, but it’s also done by courting activist groups. The groups that make up the DFL can be broken down into three camps: neighborhood activists, labor, and progressives. They are similar in size to each other, but overlap – many union members are also neighborhood types, and so on.

What’s important about these groups is that they are identity groups, meaning that people belong to them not for the issues as much as that these groups define who they are. They are fixed and unmoving. The progressives, typically the most fluid, have become more of an identity since the founding of Progressive Minnesota (now TakeAction Minnesota). Even they have ossified into a voting block whose power comes through their unity.

When identity politics takes over a city or state, it’s usually poisonous. Consensus building through compromise becomes much more difficult when there are identifiable powers looking over your shoulder all the time. The only possible way to get things done is to reach a quiescent state, or at least the appearance of one, which the tradition of DFL endorsement provides. In short, the DFL is powerful largely because our identity politics has made it essential that it be powerful. As an organization it’s really not that much to behold outside of the endorsement process.

Given that an election is a process, not an event, there is no reason to believe that changing the end-point will change a thing. The political identities will remain even if the system of choosing a councilmember is changed to a hot dog eating contest. They set the agenda and control how the message gets out. The process of running a campaign will be set by the identity groups and they will continue to raise money, send out flyers, or if they have to train a really big guy to down franks like nobody’s business. They will play whatever game is set in front of them and then proceed to play their own game once the election is completed. The elections themselves will always be relatively free of “issues” and will continue hinge on personalities and identities.

Why do people think IRV will change this? I honestly don’t know. But it does seem that they believe that the act of voting is somehow a critical part of this whole process. Any politician who’s worth a damn will tell you that you never allow a vote to take place unless you know the outcome in advance. If you know you’re going to lose, you have to go down fighting the good fight; if you are going to win, you have to take the blows magnanimously. The vote? I don’t care if it’s a vote in the legislature or at the polls, it’s only a ratification of what the people in the show already know is going down.

Before you call this cynical, keep in mind that the event of an election does, indeed, influence the process that gets us up to it. Those different groups have to be courted to get to a majority of voters, after all. But it’s the Democratic Process, not the Democratic Event, that runs our city and every other part of this nation. Supporters of IRV seem to not understand what a long, hard struggle it takes to get a candidate elected and who you have to court to make it happen.

I think they’ll realize this when their issue hits the ballot. I also think they’ll lose because they haven’t played the politics very well so far. My guess is that they’ll wonder why they lost, too, or blame it on the entrenched DFL. If that happens, it’ll only show that they aren’t very good politicians to start with; the thesis presented here will have been proven. We have a few months.