The Hamilton County, OH Board of Elections yesterday certified a petition by the Cincinnati NAACP to put proportional representation on the November ballot.

If the measure passes, voters will use the single transferable vote to elect a nine-member city council, renewing a 30-year good government experiment that ended in a vitriolic 1957 repeal effort:

The single transferable vote had allowed African Americans to be elected for the first time, with two blacks being elected to the city council in the 1950s. The nation was also seeing the first stirrings of the Civil Rights movement and racial tensions were running high. PR opponents shrewdly decided to make race an explicit factor in their repeal campaign. They warned whites that PR was helping to increase black power in the city and asked them whether they wanted a “Negro mayor.” Their appeal to white anxieties succeeded, with whites supporting repeal by a two to one margin.

I have tried recently to focus on international democracy assistance, but this could be a major development in the history of American democracy and world of electoral systems.

Today only Ireland, Northern Ireland, Australia, Malta, New Zealand, Scotland (h/t to James) and Cambridge, Mass. use STV (of the multimember variety) for governmental elections, so Cincinnati would add a case to that family.

Cincinnati is the next page in a long and underexposed history of election reform in America. From the Progressive Era through the Civil Rights movement, 22 US cities (or 24 depending on definitions) used PR-STV for local elections, many of which were in Ohio. The second to last experiment ended in 2002 with the disbanding of New York City’s school board.

While system performance varied by city and indicator, STV’s overall record was positive:

On the whole, from the available evidence, proportional representation seemed to have a beneficial effect on the cities that adopted it. It clearly produced more representative government and, where voters wanted it, a more diverse party system. Large increases in the number of effective votes were also enjoyed in these cities. It may not have resulted in the substantial increases in voter turnout that proponents predicted, but neither did it produce the increases in voter alienation that critics feared. And finally, even though PR city councils were often more diverse politically, this did not seem to impair their political efficiency or effectiveness.

Good sources for more specifics are Doug Amy’s site linked above and Robert Kolesar in Proportional Representation and Election Reform in Ohio, Kathleen Barber ed., OSU Press 1995.

STV seeks proportional results and maximizes ‘votes that elect’ by transferring votes in excess of a quota to voters’ next-ranked choices. With nine seats in Cincinnati, it will take 10 percent of votes to win each. There are different ways to transfer surplus, and Cincinnati would use the quasi-random “Cincinnati method.”

Who cares? American reformers, for one, but the ends they are pursuing should not be lost on the international democracy assistance community, which has engaged in electoral engineering from Afghanistan to Nepal over the past few years.

As Donald Horowitz, Ben Reilly and others have noted, STV (and its single-winner cousin) can benefit divided societies through the incentive it presents to campaign for second- and third-choice support outside one’s group. Because it’s a proportional system, STV prevents exclusion of significant minority groups, especially as the number of seats to elect increases. As a candidate-centric system, STV emphasizes entrepreneurial campaigns over party labels. Finally, as a system based on multimember districts, it reduces incentives to gerrymander.

Not all contexts would benefit. Innumeracy can be a barrier to a method based on ranking, and places with highly fragmented party systems probably need stronger incentives for cohesion. These caveats notwithstanding, democracy promoters should embrace the wealth of lessons learned - and to be learned - about the growing number of STV cases at home and abroad.