On Sunday, Joe Soucheray ripped a St. Paul ballot initiative promoting Instant Runoff Voting. The Pioneer Press columnist called the method (also known as Ranked Choice Voting), “A solution for which there is no problem," noting "ridiculously complicated mathematical equations ... I smell a rat.”

In a previous life, I helped organize Minneapolis’ successful IRV ballot measure — the reason the Mill City won’t have a primary Tuesday, and St. Paul will. So I definitely noticed Soucheray's withering remarks about what I see as a big RCV benefit — eliminating the low-turnout September election:

Why should the primary election be eliminated? Oh, I suppose because that requires somebody to get out on that extra occasion and vote. I've never missed a primary. That's when you weed out the stiffs and pretenders and two candidates are left standing to fight it out in the general election. Nothing could be simpler.

Well, apparently not so simple for Joe. At least, not last year. According to Ramsey County records, Joe not only has missed a primary, he missed the most recent one.

As most newspaper reporters know, voting records are public information. So it’s relatively easy to check who’s voted, though of course records don't show who you voted for.

The Ramsey County file says that “Joseph H. Soucheray” (whose address, age and spouse match) took a pass on weeding out 2008’s crop of stiffs - of which, I should note, there were plenty.

I don’t want to presume upon Soucheray's partisan affiliation — as Joe would intone on his radio show, “We don’t know that” — but all three parties featured likely U.S. Senate cadavers. Among Republicans, Norm Coleman demolished Jack Shepard; Al Franken overwhelmed Priscilla Lord Faris; and Dean Barkley topped the Independence Party’s seven-way scrum.

Now, maybe the Mayor of Garage Logic is nonpartisan. In the case, he passed on a chance to de-stiffify some competitive judge's races. Incumbent Supreme Court justices Lorie Gildea and Paul Anderson faced multiple challengers; perhaps the hardest-fought contest was an eight-way district court fight featuring ex-DFL legislator Howard Orenstein.

But wait, Logicians may say: those weren’t city elections, were the St. Paul IRV initiative is aimed. While Joe did made a blanket declaration, fairness compels me to note he voted in the 2005 primary, the last city-level election featuring a competitive race in his area.

However, Sooch seems to have missed the previous city primary, in 2003. Joe Mansky, Ramsey County’s elections manager, says he no longer has the source documents for that election, so he can’t state categorically that Soucheray didn’t vote. “It is possible a clerical error was made posting voter history on our part," Mansky notes.

That said, records indicate 154 people voted in Sooch’s precinct, but not him.

I called Soucheray 90 minutes before KSTP show today to talk about this. (Other methods have regularly failed.) Even though the message was passed on, he didn’t get back to me. I’ll update this item if he does.

Overall, Joe is an extremely faithful voter. He has voted in every general election since at least 1993. And while he’s likely missed two of the last five primaries, his record is otherwise spotless.

Although I’m an RCV backer, I have no involvement in St. Paul’s initiative, and hadn’t planned to use this space for advocacy until a prominent media member misstated his record.

I do think there are principled arguments against RCV, though there's a lot of scarifying too. For my part, I’d only say I think it’s a worthwhile effort, which — if local experiments prove out — could work powerfully for consensus winners at the state level. You can trust me on this because, since at least 1995, I’ve never missed a primary.

You can look it up.