Once again, the Minneapolis mayoral contest revealed that ranked-choice voting doesn’t deliver better campaigns or elections.
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The dust has barely settled on the most recent Minneapolis mayoral election, which will be remembered as a bitter showdown between incumbent Jacob Frey and state Sen. Omar Fateh. After a year of dramatic election twists and turns, Minneapolis voters rather handily reelected the incumbent to a third-term. With the election decided, now is the appropriate time for Minnesotans to rise and demand an end to the confusing and elitist system known as ranked-choice voting (RCV).
The reasons to abandon this convoluted election system are obvious and irrefutable but, most importantly, the abundant promises made by RCV activists once again fail to prove correct in Minneapolis.
RCV advocates frequently overpromise the benefits of this so-called “instant runoff” election system. Voters are told that our election conversations between candidates will become more “civil,” that “big money” will be less influential in determining the outcome and that voters will have better candidates, which will translate into better leaders for our communities. None of these promises were fulfilled by the 2025 Minneapolis election.
Minneapolis politics has been dominated by the DFL since Republican council member Dennis Schulstad retired as the 12th Ward council member in 1998. It’s no coincidence that soon after the DFL-majority adopted RCV for city elections, which began with the 2009 mayoral election. Since that time, the political tug-of-war in Minneapolis city elections now feature policy disputes between the left and the far-left progressive wing of the DFL.
The 2025 election featured this ongoing city dispute between the DFL and “democratic-socialist” factions, represented by Frey and Fateh, respectively. And once again, Minneapolis was in the national spotlight for all the wrong reasons. This time it was an inept city DFL mayoral endorsement convention, whose results were overturned by state party leaders due to well-documented endorsement vote discrepancies.
This overturned endorsement fight did nothing but further inflame the disagreements between the two warring factions of the DFL, producing some of the nastiest political campaigning the city has ever seen.
Furthermore, the 2025 mayor race garnered what will likely be some of the most prolific and non-transparent out-of-state contributions to sway voters’ opinions. While final candidate and independent expenditure campaign spending amounts aren’t currently available, it’s fair to say that pre-election and extremely large out-of-state PAC contributions dwarfed actual candidate expenditures – once again proving RCV advocates wrong when they promised cleaner and more transparent campaign spending.
Looking at mid-October campaign expenditure reports, Frey’s campaign reported spending nearly $1 million on his reelection fight, while the more moderate DFL-aligned political action committees reported receiving and spending nearly double that amount.
Fateh’s campaign was less prolific in its fundraising results. The progressive PAC “Minneapolis for the Many” reported fundraising results of $352,000, much of which came in large contributions from out-of-state donors. So much for “keeping big money out of politics” — a frequent RCV promise that once again failed to prove correct.
Minneapolitans were lucky that many of the uber-rich progressive donors were distracted by the similar mayoral dustup in New York City. Otherwise, much of that lefty money would have likely landed in Minneapolis, vastly increasing the out-of-state influence of these donors.
Finally, RCV activists promise greater voter interest and turnout. Citywide turnout was still only 55% of eligible voters. In a city that continues to be battered by an increase in crime, ever-increasing property taxes and a multitude of other “livability” issues, it’s frankly unbelievable that every eligible Minneapolitan didn’t show up to vote on Nov. 4.
Perhaps Minneapolis voters weren’t all that interested in determining the direction of their city by casting a vote because RCV has turned city elections into a confusing and elitist process that requires voters to study the positions of the various — but all-DFL — candidates running for office. These days, finding a safe place to park your car in the city takes priority over trying to differentiate candidate positions on important issues.
RCV doesn’t now nor has it ever lived up to its utopian promises. It is only when our cities and state become serious about election reform and abolish schemes like RCV that voters will once again return to casting ballots for serious candidates who seek to restore civility and common sense in city government.
Annette Meeks is CEO of the Freedom Foundation of Minnesota, an independent, nonprofit educational and research organization dedicated to free-market principles and liberty-based public policy initiatives.
This article first appeared on MinnPost and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
Clearly, Meeks does not understand Ranked Choice Voting or Instant Runoff Voting if she expects it to solve all our problems with elections and voting, and says it is confusing, convoluted, or elitist?, and therefore should be abandoned. Let me help.
Fundamentally, all that RCV is doing is ensuring that the winner of any race (of three or more candidates) receives at least a majority of voters (>50%) saying that the winner is “acceptable” even if not their first choice. If your first choice does not win a majority of votes, then the second choice of those voting for the candidate(s) at the bottom of the list (in terms of votes obtained) will be counted. The voter has a chance, up front, to say “if my first choice is not elected, then here is my second choice, if I have one who is acceptable.” This eliminates the wasted vote if you must choose only one. The big advantage is that the voter gets to vote for their favorite candidate and make a “statement” without fear of their vote being wasted. This tends to lead to the election of more moderate, less extreme, acceptable candidates, which I would argue is a good thing. Even if RCV rarely changes the outcome from only allowing each voter one choice, is no reason to reject it. Even if the claimed “promises” of RCV go unfulfilled the fundamental objective is still worthy and no reason to abandon RCV.
The Minneapolis mayoral race may have been between two strong candidates but RCV did confirm that Frey was an “acceptable” candidate to a majority of voters. RCV worked for us!
I agree that the original (and some continuing) arguments in favor of RCV have failed to materialize—politics is politics and nasty attacks have not gone away, sadly. I’m also not a fan of the complexity of the RCV system, as it’s hard to explain to people (particularly non-English speakers). This is especially true for the BET and Park Board at-large races, where the RCV math works differently than in every other race, and the order of your votes matters more than your preferences; you all wrote a great article about this earlier in 2025 (https://minneapolistimes.com/one-of-these-rcv-things-on-your-ballot-is-not-like-the-other). These down-ballot races suffer from both the obscurity of the office and the complexity of their vote math because they’re multi-winner races.
But it’s also unclear to me that RCV has produced any wildly unexpected results in the multiple election cycles since it started in 2009.
-Mayor: looking back at mayoral elections from 2009 onward (when RCV came into practice), the top first choice vote getter always ended up winning in Minneapolis (this pattern was upended only for the first time in 2025 by mayor-elect Kaohly Her in St. Paul, which I personally think was a good result given the shape of that city).
-In the Park Board at-large and BET races, the top first choice vote getters have always won since 2009 onward, identical to what used to happen before RCV was implemented.
-In city council ward and park board district races, the most reasonable and competent candidate has ended up winning in closely-contested races (I’m thinking Park Board District 6 in 2021, and Ward 8 city council in 2023).
-Even with the Ward 2 city council race in 2021 (frequently referred to as one of only 3 real-life examples of the Condorcet Paradox) where Robin Wonsley narrowly won by 14 votes, she was the top vote getter in Round 1.
All told, while RCV is exceedingly complex, it has almost always favored the top Round 1 vote getter (which is what used to always happen), or resulted in the most reasonable candidate being elected in tighter races (a scenario that has played out only twice across multiple city council wards and park board districts). So let’s keep it.