Thank you for your work for and/or interest in IRV this year. We have surpassed our signature gathering goal (YAY!!!), however, campaign leadership has decided to hold the signatures until early next year for a vote in the 2008 general election.

We have decided to spend the next 15 months talking to St. Paulies about IRV, gaining multi-partisan support and having lots and lots of house parties!! So in other words, the tough part is over, the next year will be mosly about the "fun stuff"!!

Below, please see the text of the press release that will go out to local St Paul papers early tomorrow. Please contact Amy Brendmoen at albrendmoen@hotmail.com if you have questions or input for the campaign as we forge ahead.

Instant Runoff Voting Campaign Completes Petition Drive -
Focus Moves to Education and Outreach For Popular Vote in 2008

Instant Runoff Voting ("IRV") advocates at the St. Paul Better Ballot Campaign ("Campaign")have decided to extend their popular election reform initiative to a 2008 vote. Today, the Campaign celebrated achieving their initial goal of collecting more than 5,200 St.Paul voters' signatures --more than the number required to trigger a ballot referendum. Volunteers will use the additional time to educate voters to ensure and demonstrate overwhelming support for IRV in a general election year.

"I have had so many wonderful conversations with St. Paul residents in the past 6 months," said Paul Busch who personally collected nearly 800 signatures. "Across the political spectrum, voters are fed up with the status quo and ready for a better, more democratic method of voting."

With the labor-intensive petition portion complete, the Campaign will continue to build support among community leaders,organizations and businesses. The Campaign will also be at community events to educate voters about the ballot initiative and schedule myriad local house parties where invitees will use IRV to vote on desserts, hors d'oeuvres or beverages in a hands-on demonstration to learn about this simple, but elegant voting system.

"We have an extraordinary supporter list and it gets deeper everyday," said campaign manager Beth Mercer Taylor. "Our experience is that the more people know about IRV, the more they like it! We want to implement IRV with a strong mandate, so we will use this additional time to reach out across St. Paul."

In St. Paul, IRV would mean that all mayoral and council candidates advance to the general election. Voters would then rank the candidates in order of preference. First-rank picks are then tallied. If no candidate wins a majority, then the lowest vote-getting candidate is dropped and that candidate's votes are redistributed to the remaining candidates based on the second-rank pick on the ballot. Once redistributed, the votes are recounted to see if a majority has been achieved. This "drop, redistribute and recount" process continues until one of the candidates gets more than 50 percent.

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