John and co-host Elissa Schufman (@schufman) have a conversation with ranked choice voting enthusiast Todd Schuman. Is there ever a good reason to not rank every slot on your ballot? Why do we only get three choices for the three Park Board at-large seats (as opposed to three for each seat)? What is a spoiled ballot? How does ranked choice voting work? Why does Todd's last name have an "f" while Elissa's does not? John opens his ballot in front of a live microphone, reveals too much about his potential mayoral preferences, complains about the absurdly long list of Minneapolis mayoral candidates, and suggests there's not much point in figuring out a third choice for mayor if your first two are Kate Knuth and Sheila Nezhad. We answer voting-related listener questions. John addresses a twitter beef. We all express our unhappiness with the idea of shifting more power to the mayor's office (Question 1 on your ballot).
After the show, Elissa fact-checked to make sure John's explanation of the 51% (as opposed to 50%+1) threshold for passage of a charter amendment is correct. Yes, it's in state law: https://www.revisor.mn.gov/statutes/cite/410.12#stat.410.12.4
For further viewing, Todd recommends these MPR explainer videos.
Single-winner RCV explainer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oHRPMJmzBBw
Multi-winner RCV explainer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lNxwMdI8OWw
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