The city of St. Paul probably won’t be moving to even-year mayoral or city council elections anytime soon.
A former city employee’s efforts to convince St. Paul to move municipal elections to even years to coincide with the gubernatorial and presidential races recently was dealt a major blow by the Minnesota Court of Appeals.
Former city financial analyst Peter Butler has long argued that switching to even-year elections could boost anemic voter turnout in city races.
A three-judge appeals panel this month sided with a Ramsey County District Court judge in determining that Butler’s petition to place a home rule charter amendment on the public ballot lacked sufficient signatures.
Butler needed 7,011 signatures from registered St. Paul voters — the equivalent of 5 percent of the total votes cast in the previous state general election, which was the 2016 presidential race.
In July 2017, he submitted 7,656 signatures to Ramsey County Elections office. Elections officials, however, informed Butler his petition was insufficient. When he inquired why, he was informed that 1,529 signers were not registered to vote in St. Paul, 231 signers did not provide their street address, and 49 names were invalidated for other reasons.
Rather than submit additional signatures within the requisite 10 days, Butler requested a district court hearing challenging the process on multiple grounds.
Among them, he said that except in the broadest terms, the county had failed to spell out the problems with his petition and how to correct them until he inquired, and valid signatures thrown out for invalid reasons.
After three subsequent reviews of the state voter registry using nicknames and less-than-full name searches, the numbers were revised upwards, but the petition still fell short by 174 signatures.
In a Jan. 14 published opinion, the appeals court found that Butler “failed to produce admissible evidence that (the county’s) reliance on the (statewide voter registration system) amounted to an error, omission, or wrongful act, and the district court properly dismissed the petition and granted (the county’s) motion for summary judgment. We see no error by the district court.”