Massey grew up in Dubuque, Iowa, and now lives in south Minneapolis with her husband, Paul, a chemical engineer, and two children, who are 10 and 7. In the Peace Corps after college, she spent two years in Costa Rica. She then got a master’s degree in urban planning and moved to Minneapolis. She has been consumed by IRV since she decided to join FairVote after the 2004 election and coordinated the effort to get IRV on the Minneapolis ballot for approval in 2006. She became executive director after Minneapolis voters agreed to allow IRV.
Costa Rica RPCV Jeanne Massey is executive director of FairVote Minnesota
Capitol Profile: Jeanne Massey
By Charley Shaw, Staff Writer
June 15, 2009
Last week’s Minnesota Supreme Court ruling upholding Minneapolis’ use of instant runoff voting (IRV) in nonpartisan, citywide elections was good news for Jeanne Massey.
But for Massey, the executive director of FairVote Minnesota, the high court’s ruling was just one milestone among many battles in the nearly five years she’s been trying to win approval for elections in which voters rank the candidates by preference on the ballot.
Massey, 47, of south Minneapolis, who is an urban planner by training, started organizing support for IRV because high-profile races in Minnesota, including three consecutive gubernatorial races, were won by candidates who received less than 50 percent of the vote.
“Increasingly common are plurality outcomes. We don’t have a system that promotes competition and choice without consequence. When there are three or more candidates on the ballot and it’s a competitive race, one or more candidates will serve as spoilers in the race because we don’t have a majority-winner requirement,” Massey says.
As she sees it, IRV is the answer.
“It takes away all strategic voting. And that means it opens the door so even if a third party candidate is not going to win by the 50-percent threshold, that candidate has equal access in the campaign process.”
IRV consolidates the primary and general elections into one election. On Election Day, voters rank the candidates based on their preference. The candidate with the least number of first-place votes is eliminated. If no candidate has 50 percent of the vote after the first candidate is eliminated, then the other candidates receive their ranked votes from the voters who cast a ballot for the first candidate eliminated and so on.
Massey has an interesting theory about how IRV will cut down on negative campaigning: Candidates will want to appeal to voters that might list them as their second preference.
“Candidates won’t want to alienate voters that could cast a second-choice vote,” Massey says.
Not everybody agrees with Massey’s view on the benefits of IRV.
Andy Cilek is the executive director of the Minnesota Voters Alliance, which has fought IRV in court. He asks hypothetical questions that suggest problems with IRV. For example, what happens to a voter who chooses only one candidate? Cilek thinks there’s potential for that person’s vote to be discarded after the first tally.
“It doesn’t guarantee a majority,” says Cilek, who is a business consultant.
The two sides might still have more court battles in front of them. Cilek says his organization will ask the U.S. Supreme Court to hear their objections to IRV on the grounds that it violates federal constitutional rights.
According to FairVote attorneys James Dorsey and Nicole Moen, the court ruling “requires” IRV for Minneapolis’ fall elections.
“If the plaintiffs pursue their claims in federal court, the outcome will likely be the same,” the attorneys said in a news release issued after last Thursday’s state Supreme Court ruling.
Massey grew up in Dubuque, Iowa, and now lives in south Minneapolis with her husband, Paul, a chemical engineer, and two children, who are 10 and 7. In the Peace Corps after college, she spent two years in Costa Rica. She then got a master’s degree in urban planning and moved to Minneapolis.
She has been consumed by IRV since she decided to join FairVote after the 2004 election and coordinated the effort to get IRV on the Minneapolis ballot for approval in 2006. She became executive director after Minneapolis voters agreed to allow IRV.
For all of the legal contention that has concerned FairVote, much of the group’s effort has been monitoring the city’s process of putting an IRV election in place. One painstaking issue has arisen because the city’s optical-scan vote counters can’t read a ranked ballot. The ballots will be counted by hand.
Massey says FairVote supports legislation from Rep. Steve Simon, DFL-St. Louis Park, and Sen. Ann Rest, DFL-New Hope, that would allow counties to purchase voting equipment that can handle ranked-choice voting. The bill also would set the rules for a statewide IRV system.
Introduced this past session, the legislation did not get a hearing.
“We hope that it moves forward next year,” Massey says.
Massey is also fighting to get IRV on the ballot in other communities. St. Paul will likely put the IRV question before voters on Nov. 3. FairVote is supporting efforts in Duluth to do the same.
“My work is really part of a big movement. It’s grass roots,” Massey says.
