Over the weekend, @MSPVotes launched an anonymous informal poll with Google Forms to gauge support of our mayoral candidates, with ballot ordering from the Secretary of State’s ballot viewer. In the end, 280 votes were received. This is hardly representative of the full voting public, but an interesting glance at support of mainly well-connected online Minneapolis political observers, participants and organizers and their audience.
The winner? Dehn
Ray Dehn came in with 146 votes, 81%, second: Nekima Levy-Pounds, with 114 and 40% of the vote.
The way the vote broke down by choice is a pretty good illustration of how IRV works. In this case, the majority of first choices did not determine the ultimate runoff result:
1st choice (280 responses)
- Nekima Levy-Pounds: 34.6% (97 votes)
- Ray Dehn: 31.8% (89 votes)
- Betsy Hodges: 22.5% (63 votes)
- Jacob Frey: 8.6% (24 votes)
2nd choice (260)
- Ray Dehn: 31.2% (81)
- Nekima Levy-Pounds: 22.3% (58)
- Betsy Hodges: 19.6% (51 votes)
- Jacob Frey: 10.4% (27 votes)
3rd choice (240)
- Nekima Levy-Pounds: 25.4% (61)
- Betsy Hodges: 18.8% (45)
- Jacob Frey: 15.4% (37)
- Ray Dehn: 12.9% (31)
The Runoff
The process (taken from here) ran in 10 rounds, with ties broken at round 2 for Tom Hoch and Jack Sparrow (each had 2 votes by this point, Hoch arbitrarily chosen), and round 7 between Gregg Iverson and Aswar Rahman (Rahman arbitrarily chosen, 1 vote each).
By the second to last round, the vote totals ended up thus:
- Nekima Levy-Pounds: 104 votes
- Ray Dehn: 101 votes
- Betsy Hodges: 70 votes
With Hodges eliminated, and her votes’ choices redistributed, Dehn came in at 146, and Levy-Pounds at 114, with Hodges voters alternate choices deciding the election.
Some interesting write-ins
- Bernie Sanders
- Samantha Pree-Stinson (Ward 3 candidate)
- Lisa Bender (Ward 10 incumbent)
- Nobody
- RT Ryback [sic]
Raw data
The raw responses are available here as a spreadsheet, get in touch with @MSPVotes if you conduct any analysis of the choices and we’ll make sure it gets around.
