Nearly a week after St. Paul voters went to the polls, a hand tally of second-choice votes determined Saura Jost to be the winner Monday in the four-way race for the Ward 3 seat on the St. Paul City Council. The ward spans Highland Park, Mac-Groveland and part of West Seventh Street.

Jost, a civil engineer who drew 6,390 votes on election night, saw her count rise to 6,617 votes as rival candidates — including write-in votes, Troy Barksdale and then Patty Hartmann — were eliminated from the tally, freeing up the second-choice picks on their ballots to be reallocated to Jost and fellow candidate Isaac Russell, the second-place vote-getter.

There were 13,396 ballots cast in total.

With more than 48% of the vote on election night, Jost’s victory was never really in doubt. Russell, Hartmann and ultimately Jost herself had expressed interest in seeing the final vote tally, a process that roped in some 15 paid Ramsey County Elections workers for a six-hour count that began at 8 a.m. Monday. Counting stopped as Jost surpassed the requisite 50% threshold.

“Me being an engineer, and being about math — once it was official, it felt a lot more real,” said Jost, as elections judges unplugged video monitors and finalized paperwork in the county elections room at 90 Plato Boulevard.

Jost, who will be seated in January, replaces Ward 3 Council Member Chris Tolbert, whose chose not to run for re-election after 12 years in office. Tolbert backed Jost in the Nov. 7 election.

Final results

Among those who were on hand to see the final results trickle in were St. Paul City Council Member Mitra Jalali, as well as council members-elect Hwa Jeong Kim and Cheniqua Johnson. Together with Anika Bowie and Nelsie Yang, the six progressive candidates — all of them women of color under the age of 40 — formed an unofficial squad that drew overlapping campaign volunteers, donors and supporters.

Wintana Melekin, a downtown resident, volunteered with all six winning campaigns.

“I wanted a city council that looked like my community,” said Melekin, who is Eritrean-American, after posing for pictures with Jalali, Johnson, Jost and Kim. “I grew up on the East Side and had almost exclusively white men representing me. I’m very excited for the future of my city.”

Russell, the second-place vote-getter, conceded to Jost a few hours after the polls closed, around 11 p.m. last Tuesday, but his campaign chose not to waive participation in a further vote count, as allowed by the city ordinance.

That decision drew criticism from Jost’s supporters on social media, but Hartmann quickly pointed out that even if Russell withdrew, the ordinance required the elections office to count second-choice ballots until a candidate surpassed 50% of the vote.

“A candidate cannot be declared the winner unless that candidate’s count of votes meets the threshold or only two candidates remain,” wrote Hartmann, in a letter to Ramsey County Elections last Thursday. “The ordinance mandates a specific process to follow. … A withdrawing candidate only removes the votes for himself.”

Jost echoed a similar sentiment on social media. “Voters deserve to see the full results,” wrote Jost last Thursday on the platform X, previously known as Twitter. “RCV (ranked-choice voting) is our system and our democracy thrives in transparency.”

Ranked-choice

In St. Paul, no candidate for mayor or city council who received a majority of the votes on election night has ever fallen to second place due to reallocation. Jeanne Massey, executive director of FairVote Minnesota, said that’s happened several times in Minneapolis, most recently last week when Minneapolis Council President Andrea Jenkins defeated challenger Soren Stevenson by less than 40 votes after being boosted by second-choice ballots.

Massey, who witnessed the hand tally in the Ward 3 race, compared the process to a political primary, in which a candidate who pulls ahead in an August primary may still lose the general election in November once a broader cross-section of voters cast ballots.

Ranked-choice voting is also known as instant run-off voting because the same process is condensed into a single election.

On Monday, Russell’s ballots grew from the 3,987 votes cast for him on election night to a final tally of 4,309 votes, once write-ins, Barksdale and Hartmann’s ballots were reallocated based on second-choice picks. The result was still well below the 6,594 votes needed to win.

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