2009 Burlington mayoral election
The 2009 Burlington mayoral election was held in March 2009 for the city of Burlington, Vermont. A few years earlier, the city had switched to holding mayoral elections every three years (e.g. the 1997 election, the 2000 election, the 2003 election, and the 2006 election), so this was the second mayoral election since the city's 2005 change to instant-runoff voting (IRV). In the 2009 election, incumbent Burlington mayor (Bob Kiss) won reelection as a member of the Vermont Progressive Party. Unlike in the city's first IRV mayoral election three years prior, however, Kiss was neither the plurality winner (since Republican candidate Kurt Wright won a plurality of first-place votes) nor the Condorcet winner (Democratic candidate Andy Montroll was the pairwise winner). This led to a controversy about the use of IRV in mayoral elections, culminating in a successful 2010 citizen's initiative repealing IRV's use by a vote of 52% to 48%. Ranked-choice voting would thus remain unused in Burlington until 2021, when voters again adopted IRV for all city council elections (but not mayoral ones) by a vote of 64% to 36%. Background The city of Burlington, Vermont approved IRV for use in mayoral elections with a 64% vote in