A 6-year-old girl was critically injured in a head-on crash involving two vehicles Saturday morning in Stacy, Minn., and alcohol is believed to have been a factor in the wreck, authorities said.

The girl was a passenger in the back seat of a vehicle that was struck about 10:35 a.m. on Stacy Trail near Falcon Avenue. She was flown to a trauma center where she was being treated for life-threatening injuries, the Chisago County Sheriff’s Office said.

Three other people in the car the girl was riding in also were hurt and taken to hospitals, but are expected to survive, the sheriff’s office said.

A 39-year-old man driving the other vehicle was taken to a hospital and later booked into the Chisago County jail. The man was being held on suspicion of driving while intoxicated and criminal vehicular operation, jail records show.

No other details about the crash were released, but “alcohol is suspected,” said Captain Derek Anklan, with the Chisago County Sheriff’s Office.

“Whatever the voters choose is what the city is going to report and implement,” said Bloomington City Clerk Jamy Hanson, whose office oversees elections.

The suburb of about 90,000 people adopted ranked-choice voting in 2020. It’s one of a number of cities that have opted to change the way residents vote, including Minneapolis, St. Paul, St. Louis Park and Minnetonka.

But the method remains controversial. The Minnesota House earlier this year rejected a bill that would have allowed more cities to use ranked-choice voting. Minnetonka voters last year voted by a wide margin to continue using the system.

Under ranked-choice voting, any candidate who receives more than half of the votes in the first round is declared the winner. If no candidate reaches that threshold, the person with the lowest number of votes is eliminated; elections workers then look at the ballots of people who had ranked that person first and instead add their second-choice candidates to the tally. The process continues until a candidate reaches the threshold needed to win.

Both supporters and opponents acknowledge it’s difficult to pinpoint whether ranked-choice voting changed the outcome of Bloomington races, in part because there’s not a definitive way to know who would have won the primary and competed in the general election under the old system. Of the 10 most recent Bloomington races, six were decided in the first round and four were tabulated using ranked-choice voting methods.

Opponents argue ranked-choice voting was rushed through when voters were distracted by other pressing issues like the COVID-19 pandemic. They say the system is confusing, contributes to voter fatigue, and undermines people’s already fragile faith in the election system. Now, they say, is the time to reevaluate.

The Minnesota Department of Education (MDE) has refused to turn over more than 2,000 files involving complaints and state oversight of charter schools to the Minnesota Star Tribune, despite publicly acknowledging that the complaints are a matter of public record.

The Star Tribune requested the charter school records Feb. 1, when it was in the early stages of reporting on Minnesota’s groundbreaking experiment with charter schools. The Star Tribune published a three-part series detailing oversight problems and widespread failures among Minnesota’s charter schools last week.

Though MDE routinely has provided records to the Star Tribune within weeks or months in prior requests for public records, the department hasn’t provided the bulk of the material covered in the newspaper’s Feb. 1 request. Within seven months, MDE has turned over just seven of the requested records.

Sam Snuggerud, the spokeswoman for the department, said in a statement that it is a complicated issue, spanning decades of data, and the agency “plans to produce another portion” of the request by the end of this month.

She added that the department receives hundreds of data requests each year and must review data to protect the privacy of students, families and teachers.

“MDE does not delay responding to data requests – in fact, the agency continues to work on the thousands of pages of data that may be responsive to this specific request,” she said in a statement. “The more complicated the request, the longer a response can take. Several months is not an unreasonable amount of time to respond to a complicated request.”

Attorney Leita Walker, who represents the Star Tribune, asked the department to turn over the records by the end of September or face a lawsuit over what she called the department’s “constructive denial” of the request, which she said constituted a violation of the Minnesota Data Practices Act.

“Star Tribune is deeply disappointed in MDE’s lack of transparency over the past year and what appears to be a strategy of delay in disclosing data of significant public interest and concern,” Walker said in a Sept. 11 letter to MDE Staff Attorney Adam Heuett, who previously identified himself as MDE’s “data practices compliance official.”