Frequently Asked Questions

The people will save their government, if the government itself will allow them.

Which races has the switch to approval voting in Fargo affected?

The switch to approval voting has affected races to fill positions for the City of Fargo itself, i.e. for the mayor, commissioners, and municipal judge.

This change does not affect Fargo School Board, Fargo Park District, or Cass County Commission races... at least not yet.

What is Approval Voting?

How long had we been talking about reforms in Fargo?

Why not a runoff election?

Legally, in order to have a runoff election, it cannot be held for at least 95 days after the triggering election, due to the fact that the election needs to be advertised, ballots need to be prepared and sent to overseas citizens, et cetera, which will stretch the campaign season out several months. This campaign stretch will drain the resources of the candidates.

“Boo-hoo,” you say, “the poor candidates will have to spend more money.” While it’s true that cost of elections to candidates isn’t the first concern that comes to mind, consider what high costs limit: they limit the ability for all citizens to run for office.

If elections are expensive then only the wealthy (in money, free-time, or both) are able to run for office, let alone win. Keeping costs for candidates down is a necessity for a fair and open government.

Furthermore, runoffs don’t solve the vote splitting¹ or center-squeeze² issues. Runoff elections are still comprised of top vote-getters from the regular election, but this doesn’t mean that all voters would have been able to vote their consciences due to fear of splitting the vote.

Runoffs are simply a lose-lose situation for everyone involved.

Why approval voting instead of instant-runoff voting?

Instant-runoff voting, or IRV, is functionally the same as a traditional runoff⁵ except, instead of making voters show up multiple times to vote, voters rank the candidates on their intial ballot. This ranking allows the voter to leave instructions on how they'd vote in subsequent runoff elections so they don't have to show up more than once.

Importantly, IRV suffers from every problem traditional runoffs have except for candidate and voter fatigue (i.e. excessive campaign resource drain, apathy toward continued elections, etc.)

Furthermore, while sixteen cities across the country have adopted IRV in order to improve their elections, importantly, five of these sixteen cities (31%) have repealed IRV due to a myriad of issues. These issues include ballot complexity, calculation complexity, voter confusion, and also because they’ve experienced election failures due to the fact that IRV is non-monotonic⁶. This means that voters can get better results by either not being sincere or not even showing up.

An election system that can punish voters for showing up is not a desirable election system.

While no voting system is perfect and all voting systems (FPTP, IRV, approval, etc.) suffer problems, the task force determined that approval voting's benefits outweigh those of both our current FPTP system and IRV, thusly recommending it instead.

Why do the results for the multi-winner races in N.D. always seem off?

The N.D. Secretary of State’s office reports percentages⁷ for all races, ultimately, as “number of ovals for candidate X filled / number of total ovals filled for that race” and, for most races, this isn’t really an issue that needs to be addressed.

There are two situations where the percentages provide misleading notions about the state of a race, however: races where there are very few voters who engage and multi-winner races.

For races where few voters engage, what that means is, during an election, some races will only be voted on by a fraction of the total voters, since it’s common for voters to skip sections of the ballot. Given that the N.D. SoS reports the total number of voters overall, but not the number of voters who voted in every race, this can imply that more of the voting public voted for a candidate than actually did.

For example, if the N.D. SoS reports that 10,000 voters participated in the election yet omits the fact that only one voter voted for anyone in the Fargo mayoral race, the person she voted for would be reported as winning with 100% of the vote, implying all 10,000 voters also voted for the winner. While such an extreme example has never occurred, it should be clear that this can provide a misleading result under many circumstances.

For multi-winner races, this problem is exacerbated further. Imagine 10,000 voters voting under our current system for the Fargo City Commission race which has two winners and allows voters to vote for up to two of them. If every voter each votes for both candidates X and Y together, both X and Y would win... and be reported to have each won with 50% of the vote. This is because each candidate would have received 10,000 “ovals” divided by 20,000 “total filled-in ovals”. It can be contended that both X and Y should be considered to have received 100% support of the voters, not just 50% each. Because of this issue, reports of vote percentages in multi-winner races are perceptually skewed downward.

In order for percentages for any multi-winner race to be reported in a non-misleading fashion, they should be calculated as "total-votes-for-candidate-X / total-voters-engaged-in-race" or "total-votes-for-candidate-X / total-ballots-cast".

For our ballot initiative, we chose to mandate that percentages be calculated with "total-votes-for-candidate-X / total-ballots-cast" for two reasons: 1) Current Cass county election equipment is not capable of providing "total-voters-engaged-in-race" and; 2) we want to shed light on the lack of engagement many races receive and fight the skew that occurs when facing the first scenario we outlined above.

Where is approval voting used?

We proudly use it in Fargo.

Fargo is the first city to do so in American history. Our sister organization, STL Approves, followed our lead and worked to successfully bring Approval Voting to St. Louis, Missouri to become the second American city; and, on top of that, organizations across the country use this system for elections, from the staff senate at North Dakota State University to the student body at the University of Colorado at Boulder to the Mathematical Association of America to the Texas Libertarian Party. Government elections, such as those asking the public to choose acceptable options for infrastructure projects, have also been administered throughout the United States using this system.

In addition, the State of North Dakota almost adopted this system for statewide elections in 1987—it passed the Senate but died in the House.

And, as our ballot initiative proved, approval voting is not a radical idea for North Dakota—that's why we have it here in Fargo, now.

Who's behind Reform North Dakota?

We're a team of over 30 passionate citizens from across the political spectrum who believe in making our community better. We're headed up by Jed Limke, an engineer who served on the City of Fargo’s Elections and Governance Task Force and led our 2018 ballot initiative to an overwhelming victory to make Fargo the first city in the nation to use approval voting.

How do we contact you?

You can reach @ReformFargo on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, or by emailing us.

Reform ND? What happened to Reform Fargo?

They're both us! Officially our 501(c)(4) non-profit is registered as Reform North Dakota (and always has been) with a doing-business-as designation of Reform Fargo. As we have been shifting to focus on combating statewide attacks on voting rights, expect to see content branded as both Reform ND and Reform Fargo from time to time.