Welcome to election season, and, as always, apologies to the people who followed me for my science fiction rather than my election blog (I feel less bad about inflicting science fiction on the people who follow me for election blogging).

Minneapolis and Saint Paul both have City Council races. Saint Paul also has a School Board At-Large race with four open seats.

In Minneapolis, there’s a race in every ward except Ward 2 — Robin Wonsley is running unopposed. There are open seats in Ward 7 and Ward 12. (Which is to say, the current incumbent is not running again.)

In St. Paul, there’s a race in every single ward and wards 1, 3, 5, and 7 are open seats.

Does it feel like we just did this? If you live in Minneapolis, you had a city election just two years ago. But we had a census in 2020, followed by redistricting, and Minneapolis has the “Kahn rule” saying that the city needs to hold new elections once redistricting is completed. Back in 2020, Minneapolis had a City Question that proposed a second two-year term for City Council reps, if necessary, to keep the Mayoral and City Council races synchronized. It passed by a wide margin. So the Minneapolis races are all for a two-year term.

If you live in St. Paul and it feels like we just did this, well, we last had City Council races in 2019, you’re just suffering from the “what even is time?” problem where March of 2020 lasted for 847 days. Or else you’re remembering that we had a mayoral race in 2021. Our City Council and mayoral races have been out of sync either forever or for a good long time. The St. Paul candidates are all running for a four-year term.

Saint Paul also has a City Question regarding the implementation of a 1% sales tax to fund repairs to streets and parks. I don’t think Minneapolis has any City Questions this year.

I have a book coming out this fall, in November! Liberty’s Daughter is near-future SF about a teenage girl on a libertarian seastead. A lot of it was originally published as short fiction in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. You can pre-order it in either book or ebook format from whatever you like.

I do not have a Patreon or Ko-Fi, so if you’d like make a donation to encourage my work, I’m going to start by pointing my readers at this new Art teacher at Jenny Lind elementary who needs to stock her classroom with supplies.