Dan Drake 🦆<p>I was excited to use ranked-choice voting / instant runoff to vote for Saint Paul mayor yesterday. I was also excited to see it go to a second round of counting -- with traditional voting, we would have a third term with Carter, but RCV yielded the city's first female, and first Hmong-American mayor. </p><p>Algorithms matter, folks.</p><p>I am a little confused about the results, though -- the declared winner, Kaohly Her, only got 48% of the vote. But RCV should finish with a majority winner. It seems like they dropped more than one candidate after the first round, but looking at the first-round results --</p><p><a href="https://electionresults.sos.mn.gov/results/Index?ErsElectionId=187&scenario=LocalMunicipality&FipsCode=58000&show=Go" rel="nofollow noopener" translate="no" target="_blank"><span class="invisible">https://</span><span class="ellipsis">electionresults.sos.mn.gov/res</span><span class="invisible">ults/Index?ErsElectionId=187&scenario=LocalMunicipality&FipsCode=58000&show=Go</span></a></p><p>-- I'm not sure which candidate got dropped or how ballots got reallocated.</p><p>So. I've emailed the reporter who wrote a couple articles on this (for example, <a href="https://www.twincities.com/2025/11/04/voters-await-results-in-st-paul-mayors-race/" rel="nofollow noopener" translate="no" target="_blank"><span class="invisible">https://www.</span><span class="ellipsis">twincities.com/2025/11/04/vote</span><span class="invisible">rs-await-results-in-st-paul-mayors-race/</span></a>). </p><p>Overall, though: RCV FTW.</p><p><a href="https://mathstodon.xyz/tags/democracy" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#<span>democracy</span></a> <a href="https://mathstodon.xyz/tags/math" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#<span>math</span></a> <a href="https://mathstodon.xyz/tags/algorithms" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#<span>algorithms</span></a> <a href="https://mathstodon.xyz/tags/politics" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#<span>politics</span></a> <a href="https://mathstodon.xyz/tags/stpaul" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#<span>stpaul</span></a></p>