(I’m doing Question 2 first because it’s easier. I’m planning to do Question 1 next.)

St. Paul City Question 2 is about election scheduling. Here’s the question, which will appear on your ballot if you are a St. Paul resident. (Minneapolis residents don’t have this question on their ballot, although it’s been discussed as a thing they might want to do.)

City Question 2 (St. Paul)
Changing City Elections to Presidential Election years.

Shall Chapter 7 (Elections) of the City Charter be amended as follows: Sec. 7.01. – City elections. The election of city officers and such other officers as are required by law to be elected at a city election shall be held on the first Tuesday after the first Monday in November in odd numbered presidential election years. Notwithstanding Section 2.02 of this Charter setting four-year terms, and to transition to presidential election years, councilmembers elected on November 7, 2023, shall serve a five-year term and a mayoral election shall occur on November 4, 2025, for a three-year term. Currently, city elections take place in odd years. A “yes” vote changes City elections to take place in presidential election years, which occur in even years. A “no” vote keeps City elections in odd years.

The crossout is what get removed, the underlining is what gets added. This is pretty straightforward: right now, city elections are held in odd-numbered years (and the mayoral and city council races don’t line up, which is kind of annoying). The question is whether all the city races should be moved to Presidential years.

The rationale for this is very straightforward: turnout is generally pretty high in presidential years, much lower for off-year city elections, and lots of people will vote in the city races if they’re already standing there with a ballot.

The argument against making this change is that presidential races tend to suck up all the air in the room, and no one’s going to be paying attention to their mayoral or city council options if they’re busy being distracted by Trump or the next iteration thereof lying his ass off on TV.

ETA: the other major argument against making this change is that it’s not clear that St. Paul can both have its local elections in Presidential years, and use ranked-choice voting for local elections. State law requires “a single ballot card” in precincts using optical scan voting systems. There was a proposal to change this, the Local Options bill, which changed it to “a single ballot card, if possible,” but the Local Options bill did not pass.

The Minneapolis City Attorney analyzed this and found a number of obstacles to putting city elections into even years, one of which was the ranked choice problem. City politics guy Josh Martin has a thread of analysis here. And the fact that there is this long list of problems with this shift that just got completely handwaved by the people who put it on the ballot: super not reassuring. I am now a more emphatic NO vote. /end ETA

ETA 10/28: The group of local citizens who petitioned to put this on the ballot also have a website promoting their arguments. I will note that they kind of blithely claim that there would be no impediment to continuing ranked-choice voting because the City Code allowed for ranked-choice and non-ranked-choice votes to occur on the same card. (“Mixed-election method ballots. If elections are held in which ranked voting is used in addition to other methods of voting, the ranked voting and non-ranked voting election must be on the same ballot card if possible, with ranked voting and non-ranked voting portions clearly separated on the ballot card. If placement of all offices to be elected cannot be placed on a single ballot card, a separate ballot card may be used for those offices to be elected using ranked voting.”) Peter Butler, one of the petitioners, also sent a Letter to the Editor at the Star Tribune where he objects to a prior letter raising the ranked choice/presidential year/state law problem and says “The current city ballot is poorly designed for RCV: Candidates’ names are repeated multiple times and candidates for the same race appear on multiple rows (think Sudoku). The city can easily combine federal and city elections by using the latest electronic voting technology. The RCV ballot will have a cleaner, more compact format,” which ignores the fact that the exact section of St. Paul City Code his website cites actually specifies the format (“If a voting system is to be used, and the voting system can be programmed to do so, the ballot must include a number of columns equal to the number of candidates for mayor or council member, plus one (1), not to exceed a total number of six (6) columns. A number indicating the voter’s choice must be listed for each column, beginning with the voter’s first choice in the left-hand column, and continuing in order with the second and successive choices until all columns have been numbered.”)

I’ll note that Peter Butler has been featured on my blog before as a crank candidate. (End second ETA)

I am absolutely going to vote “no” on this because my strong personal preference is to spread out the work I do. It is a huge amount of work to research and write about as many races as I do, and I like having city races in the odd years. I also honestly think it’s good for the city to have elections where we are just discussing city issues.

I don’t think this is just a me problem: I think this would also be an issue for the League of Women Voters volunteers who moderate community forums, the spaces where those forums happen, the newspaper column inches available to discuss the election, etc. (But maybe not! Maybe none of this would be an issue! This is just a hunch based on how I feel about putting it all in one year.)

I do know that the reason I started doing this is that downticket races chronically get squeezed out and it’s hard for me to believe that this problem would not get worse if city races were happening in the same years as the national races.

I am not sure what the electoral ramifications would be, other than, I expect DFL endorsement would matter even more than it already does, because so many people would show up not knowing much about the city races, and DFLers will generally err on the side of voting for DFL-endorsed candidates if they don’t know anything else about the race.

Would it be good for the city or bad for the city? I have no idea. It would be bad for me, though, so. I’m going with “self interest” on my vote in this race.

ETA: The people who petitioned to put this on the ballot are not people I trust at all to have thought through how it would work (see above). I think it would in fact be bad for the city, in the sense that it would open a large can of worms created by a conflict in State Law and City Code. If we have tripartite DFL governance next year it’ll probably be quickly solved. If we don’t, it’ll be a big old mess that the Republicans will happily make worse because they hate blue cities. I don’t want that!

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I do not have a Patreon or Ko-Fi but instead encourage people to donate to fundraisers I can then see fund. Usually I do teacher fundraisers (and I found one for this year, Ms. Pierce at Lucy Craft Laney school in North Minneapolis who would like donations to buy snacks for her students and supplies like Lysol wipes — stuff that schools with wealthier families just have the parents send in).

But I’m also fundraising for something slightly more personal to my family this year: YMCA Camp Northern Lights. Camp Northern Lights is a family camp, which is a camp that whole families attend together. My family went to Camp Du Nord (the other YMCA family camp) for many years, and my daughter Kiera has worked as a counselor at Camp Northern Lights for the last two summers. One of the things that makes Camp Northern Lights unique is their serious commitment to inclusion of families from communities that have been underrepresented at YMCA camps.

Last summer, Camp Northern Lights had a serious fire early in the summer — no one was hurt, but they lost their commercial kitchen and the housing for the counselors-in-training. They are hoping to raise enough money to rebuild an expanded kitchen. I have set up a fundraiser towards that goal. If you’d like to express your appreciation for the usefulness of this blog, you can show your love by donating to my fundraiser!