BISMARCK, N.D. (AP) — When Fargo voters approved a unique local election system in 2018, their goal was to choose candidates with broader support to lead North Dakota’s largest city.
It worked — maybe too well.
Now the state Legislature is moving to ban the system, with the lawmaker pushing for the restriction saying it elects “vanilla” candidates rather than the “principled” leaders he thinks Fargo residents deserve.
“When you have middle-of-the-road candidates that don’t take hard stances, they tend to be more tolerable to more people, and I believe this voting method is attempting to hire those people for the job,” said Republican Rep. Ben Koppelman, who sponsored the bill banning the system. “It doesn’t want any heavily principled people that might be polarizing to some.”
Fargo leaders disagree. The dispute has raised questions about local control and also what kind of officials voters want to represent them.
As Mayor Tim Mahoney puts it, “We think we have a system that allows for any candidate to run but also allows the city (voters) to choose the people they feel best represent them.”
Under the system, voters can choose as many candidates as they like, and the one receiving the most votes wins. The system is different from ranked voting, in which voters rank candidates in order of preference.
Since Fargo voters overwhelmingly passed the “approval voting” ballot initiative, the city of 133,000 people has held three elections. Backers of the new system said they wanted to avoid outcomes where winning candidates took office with only a small percentage of the vote.
For example, in 2018 before the new system began, nine candidates ran for two open city commissioner seats, with the winners receiving 18% and 16.5% of the vote. By contrast, in the seven-person 2024 commission race, the two winners had support from 46% and 44.5% of voters, respectively.
Approval voting doesn’t guarantee a winning candidate will receive 50% of the vote, but it tends to elect people with broad appeal.
While it hasn’t significantly changed the ideological makeup of Fargo’s nonpartisan City Commission, winners take office with a bigger mandate, said Jed Limke, who led the effort to switch to the new system.
Limke said it is working as intended.
“Why shouldn’t we be allowed to try things in our city? How we elect people in Fargo, we aren’t forcing Milnor to elect in a certain way, or Washburn — we’re not making them do it differently,” he said, referring to other North Dakota cities.
After Fargo approved the system, voters in St. Louis adopted approval voting in 2020. Benjamin Singer, the CEO of citizens group Show Me Integrity, cited the support in Fargo for advancing the St. Louis effort, which he said is better at holding leaders accountable.
In 2023, North Dakota’s Legislature passed a bill from Koppelman banning Fargo’s system but then-Gov. Doug Burgum vetoed it. He called the bill state overreach and a blatant infringement on local control.
This year, the state House approved a similar bill and it will be up for vote soon in the Senate, where it is expected to pass. Republican Gov. Kelly Armstrong has not indicated whether he supports it.
The bill would also ban ranked choice voting, which is used in Alaska, Maine and numerous cities but not in North Dakota.
Some of the opposition to Fargo’s system among lawmakers likely is due to long-running criticism of the city as wanting to rule for itself. In 2023, Fargo school officials said they would defy the state’s transgender bathroom restrictions and the city sued the state over a gun control law.
By national standards, Fargo is relatively conservative. Its county — home to one-quarter of North Dakota’s population mostly thanks to Fargo — voted for Donald Trump three times.
But Fargo is not as conservative as the rest of the state and has a more diverse population. Most of the Legislature’s Democrats are from Fargo.
Still, data shows approval voting hasn’t produced a commission full of liberals, said Jason Marisam, a professor at Mitchell Hamline School of Law. He notes it can reduce negative campaign rhetoric because the system can reward those with crossover appeal.
“The voting system doesn’t help liberal candidates,” Marisam said. “It helps candidates who are trying to appeal to a broader cross-section of the electorate and not anchor themselves to one end of the political ideology or the other, left or right.”
Fargo’s mayor said the proposed ban is “unfortunate because it’s kind of one of those funky things that works for us.”
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The first name of the person who led the effort to switch to the new system has been corrected to Jed instead of Jim.
