Will instant runoff voting be implemented?
Memphis voters affirmed their support for instant runoff voting when they went to the polls this week, but the question of whether the method allowing voters to rank their candidate choices will be implemented in future city elections remains unanswered.
More than 70 percent of the Memphis voters who weighed in a decade ago approved instant runoffs, but they were never implemented. Almost 63 percent of city voters on Tuesday cast ballots against repealing instant runoff voting, which stirred heated debate leading up to Tuesday’s election.
“There are going to be a few obstacles to get it done,” Memphis City Council Attorney Allan Wade said.
The Shelby County Election Commission has asked Tennessee Elections Coordinator Mark Goins for a formal opinion on the legality of instant runoffs in Tennessee, after a September 2017 Goins letter that said that election procedure may conflict with state law.
With that case still in play, Goins declined to comment on Wednesday, but said he expected further clarification to be issued soon.
“As far as we’re concerned, IRV is the law of the land,” said Carlos Ochoa, media coordinator for Save IRV Memphis, the group that advocated fiercely against the three Memphis charter amendment questions on Tuesday’s ballot. “As far as we’re concerned, there’s no law, there’s no ruling that’s going to prevent its implementation in Memphis.”
With instant runoff voting, the top vote-earner wins the race if they garner a majority of votes. If no candidate receives more than 50 percent of votes, a runoff is triggered.
The Memphis City Council or the Tennessee General Assembly would need to clear up a number of unknowns before instant runoffs could be implemented, Shelby County Election Commission spokeswoman Suzanne Thompson said on Wednesday.
Some of the outstanding questions are: how many candidate rankings will be allowed? What will be done if there is an equal number of votes for the second place position? Are candidates able to be eliminated when a win is mathematically impossible for them?
“These are just some of the questions that would need to be clearly outlined by a legislative body,” Thompson said in an email. “Taking all of that into consideration, we don’t have a sense when any of that might occur. We just run the elections with the rules set out to us by law.”
Memphis voters on Tuesday also denied longer mayoral and City Council term limits, and voted against eliminating runoff elections. The City Council approved spending up to $40,000 on an “informational campaign” leading up to Tuesday’s election, but council members have not provided a breakdown on how those funds were spent.
Jamie Munks covers Memphis city government and politics for The Commercial Appeal. She can be reached at jamie.munks@commercialappeal.com or 901-529-2536. Follow her on Twitter @journo_jamie_.