In the meantime, Donald Trump had happened. However one felt about candidates winning without majorities, ranked choice voting’s potential to reduce extremism and encourage broad-based appeals suddenly made it feel much more urgent. And Minnesota had run out of new cities to enroll. In 2020 Massey approached her board with an audacious plan to identify state legislators and candidates of either party who would embrace ranked choice voting and do everything possible to put them over the top in the coming election.
Maureen Reed, a retired physician who chairs the board, recognized the logic. “I was not an emergency room physician,” she told me over lunch in the Rathskeller, the vaulted basement restaurant of Minnesota’s stately Capitol. “I did internal medicine and geriatric care. I was trying to keep people healthy.” In her own search for root causes, Reed had migrated from medicine to public health to public policy. Her own work on health care had convinced her that “the rhetoric of hyper-partisanship has led to gridlock.” The board authorized Massey’s plan. The organization received large gifts for its lobbying and education program from local, regional and national foundations; by far the biggest, $1,755,000 over three years plus $150,000 for More Voices Minnesota, FairVote’s PAC, came from John Arnold, a Houston hedge fund manager and philanthropist. Arnold is indeed located out-of-state, but the funds were publicly disclosed. He does not appear to have any connection to George Soros.
The Covid-era election of 2020 proved to be a warm-up exercise. In the 2022 election, FairVote dispensed $140,000 in political donations to Democratic candidates, a significant sum for statewide races, while also conducting its energetic door-knocking campaign. Ranked choice voting was hardly the chief issue that year; abortion and criminal justice issues in the aftermath of George Floyd’s death mattered far more. But FairVote’s money and energy helped flip the state Senate and produced a “trifecta” — a Democratic House, Senate and governor. Many of those Democrats have reason to feel grateful to FairVote. While I was trailing Massey across the State Capitol, I asked why state Sen. Heather Gustafson had agreed to speak at the rally the next day. “She’s a big supporter,” Massey explained. “We targeted swing districts” — including hers. (Gustafson did not, in fact, show up for the rally.)
The trifecta made ranked choice voting legislation possible — but just barely. Though prominent moderate Republicans in the state, including former U.S. Sen. Dave Durenberger and ex-Gov. Arne Carlson, endorsed the idea, the Minnesota GOP, like the party almost everywhere, has become both more conservative and more truculent. Today’s Republicans treat almost all facially neutral political reforms, whether eliminating gerrymandering, reducing the influence of money or instituting nonpartisan primaries, as a plot to elect Democrats. It’s no surprise, then, that not a single Republican legislator in the state has publicly supported ranked choice voting.
When I asked Mark Koran, a Republican member of the state House and leading critic, why he opposed the bill, he first told me about the out-of-state dark money, though without repeating the Soros canard. Koran disputed the ranked choice voting talking points. “There’s a claim that we can create a kinder, gentler electoral system,” he said. But in the aftermath of the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis, he said, progressive candidates had run inflammatory campaigns. Minnesota already had high turnout and a wide diversity of candidates, he added. Why fix what isn’t broke? If there was a problem, he said, it was “transparency.” Outside dark money, he claimed, had been deployed to defeat county prosecutors prepared to investigate vote fraud. Koran told me about the 2008 U.S. Senate race in which Democrat Al Franken had defeated Republican Norm Coleman thanks, he said, to “11,000 fraudulent votes,” including 340 ineligible felons. That was the real electoral issue — and no one was looking at it.
Jeanne Massey had lined up a star witness for the House Elections Committee hearing — Mary Peltola, the Alaska Democrat who had defeated Palin for Congress last year. Peltola had won only 10 percent of the votes in the state’s open primary, but that had been enough to vault her into the general election, where she defeated Palin largely because 15,000 people who had voted for more moderate Republican Nick Begich had listed Peltola rather than Palin as their second choice. At the same time, Sen. Lisa Murkowski, who had voted to impeach Trump for inciting the Jan. 6 Capitol riot, finished in a virtual dead heat with Trumpist Kelly Tshibaka and then retained her seat thanks to votes she received after a Democrat was eliminated. Alaska was providing proof of concept — and vindication of the fears on the right.
The room in which the committee met had tables, chairs and microphones in the center with seats rising up on either side. As if by an unspoken prior design, the blue shirts filled one set of seats and the oranges the other. The hearing thus bore an odd resemblance to a college football game, though refs do not typically have to silence fans as the presiding member did to the blues during testimony from an ranked choice voting opponent. Democratic state Rep. Cedrick Frazier, the sponsor of the bill in the House, spoke first. Frazier, who is Black, argued that ranked choice voting encourages ethnic and racial minorities, as well as other outsiders, to run for office since they might win in later rounds.
Then Peltola took a seat beside him. A native Yup’ik, Peltola has a warm smile and an air of gentle dignity. She spoke of the lawn-placard dynamics of ranked choice voting. “I could not afford to alienate my opponents’ supporters,” she said, “because second- and third-choice voters were critical in determining who would win. I could not take any vote for granted or write any voter off.” In testimony later that morning before a state Senate Committee, Peltola made a striking point about nonpartisan primaries. “I would not have made it out of a primary,” she said, “because I’m not liberal enough.” With partisan primaries, she complained, “We go farther to the right and farther to the left.”
