Ward 6 includes Cedar-Riverside and several other neighborhoods with a lot of immigrants. It’s currently represented by Jamal Osman, who won a special election in 2020 to replace Abdi Warsame after he resigned to lead the city’s Public Housing Authority instead. There were twelve candidates a year ago; now there are two. Abdirizak Bihi was also on last year’s ballot. (He was dropped on the second ballot. AK Hassan made it one more round, then AJ Awed made it one more round past that. Both Hassan and Awed are running for other offices this year — Hassan to be re-elected to the Park Board, Awed for mayor.)

This has been an extremely strange year to learn the job of City Council rep. Jamal Osman notes that he has not yet gone to an in-person City Council meeting.

On the ballot:

Jamal Osman (DFL)
Abdirizak Bihi (DFL)

Neither has the DFL endorsement.

tl;dr after a whole lot of waffling I decided on Osman, but I think undecided voters should read the post to see if they agree with me. ETA: after some late-breaking news I’m going to say I have no idea who I’d vote for. (For a full update you can scroll down to the boldfaced “I AM NOT SURE WHERE TO EVEN START.”)