8
NEWS
Tishaura Jones addressing supporters on primary night. | DANNY WICENTOWSKI
The Primary’s Big Winners — and Losers Written by
DANNY WICENTOWSKI
T
ishaura Jones and Cara Spencer will face each other in the April 6 general election to be St. Louis’ next mayor, but last week’s unprecedented primary was bigger than just the candidates’ individual victories. The election was also an experiment: As the RFT detailed previously, St. Louis’ rollout of approval voting has been shadowed by measures of both anticipation and concern, and no one could predict how voters would behave
8
RIVERFRONT TIMES
when given the option to approve of “as many” candidates as they wished. One researcher described the March 2 primary as simply “a big unknown.” But as the dust begins to settle, some of those doubts are now clear — a cause for celebration to some, and, for others, a disaster. Winner: Approval Voting The first big uestion of the primary — would St. Louis voters actually “approve” multiple candidates? — was answered shortly after 8 p.m. with the first batch of results released by the St. Louis Board of Election Commissioners. At the time, Patrick Lynn, campaign manager for Lewis Reed, was inside S Wires Restaurant Annex in Lafayette S uare, where the campaign’s watch party was just getting started. Standing at a computer set up next to a projector at the front of the room, Lynn pulled up the early results from 3,934 absentee ballots: They
MARCH 10-16, 2021
riverfronttimes.com
Cara Spencer easily outpaced Lewis Reed to advance. | COURTESY CARA SPENCER CAMPAIGN showed Tishaura Jones ahead of Reed by less than two percentage points, with Cara Spencer comfortably in third. But what stood out to Lynn was total votes, the “approvals,” numbering some 5,400 — far more than the number of ballots. Working the math out in his head, he said the numbers suggested that about 40 percent of voters were approving multiple candidates. “I’m actually surprised it’s this high. I was thinking it was going to be more like one-third of the people would vote for more than one,” he said, scrolling through the numbers. “I think there’s probably a lot of people who showed up at the polls on primary day and had no idea that you could vote for more than one.” Whether or not voters knew about the new system beforehand, they appeared to embrace it. The final, unofficial results show voters approved an average of 1.56 candidates per ballot.
It was a major victory for the approval voting system, which has never been tested in a city of St. Louis’ size or political complexity. Aaron Hamlin, executive director of the nonprofit Center for lection Science — which has backed local efforts, including those in St. Louis, to institute approval voting systems — tweeted joyfully primary night as the results made it more and more clear that voters had indeed responded to the new system. Hamlin noted that “the progressive vote in St. Louis was not split,” seemingly in reference to the progressive candidates’ performance, with 57 percent of voters approving Tishaura Jones and 46 percent approving Cara Spencer. This wasn’t 2017 all over again. “No voting bloc should have to suffer from vote-splitting,” Hamlin’s tweet continued. “Good luck doing that under the crappy choose-one voting method. More cities need to use approval voting!”
