The Democratic Piece

The Providence Journal reports City Council interest in adding some number of at-large seats to its ranks. Currently 15 councilpersons are elected in single-member districts.

Councilman Seth Yurdin, representing Fox Point, has put forth a plan that would dramatically increase the size of the council, to 21 members. It would keep the existing 15 wards, and add 6 at-large seats. The citywide seats would be elected by a method of proportional representation known as the single transferable vote to ensure that council members come from across the city, and not solely from economically powerful areas.

A competing proposal calls for adding just two at-large seats elected under the bloc vote.

Dubbing the PR plan “fifteen and six,” a good letter to the editor by a RI state legislator gets into some of the considerations: citywide accountability, campaign costs, women and minority representation and council size more generally.

Council domination - by a neighborhood, class or some organized interest - usually comes up when people start talking about moving away from wards toward at-large elections. STV is a good way to address those concerns.

Most (but not all) local-level electoral system reform talk happens on the west coast, so it’s fun to see the same in a ‘classic’ northeastern city like Providence.

The People’s Governor tonight reaffirmed his reform credentials by vetoing AB 1294 (PDF), which would have let general law municipalities use proportional representation and instant runoff (also known as STV).
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Australian Prime Minister John Howard has set November 24 as the date for the next federal election. (Thanks to Electoral Panorama for the tip-off). STV will be used in 3-seat 6-seat districts for Senate elections, and its single-winner variant, IRV or the Alternative Vote, will be used to elect the Commons.

The Man of Steel, as he came to be known in some circles, was an eager participant in the 2003 Iraq venture. If the reactions to the ABC story on the announcement are remotely representative, he’ll probably pay the price in votes.
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CA Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger last night vetoed two bills on write-in votes and ballot initiatives. One would have provided for counting of write-ins when voters filled out the name field but did not check the write-in box. Another would have restricted who may collect signatures for a ballot measure.

Still on Schwarzenegger’s desk is the AB 1294 local options bill. It would legalize the single transferable vote for use in general law municipalities.

The word is that he also vetoed two others: one letting new citizens register on election day if their naturalization wasn’t complete by the registration deadline, another letting absentee voters drop ballots off at any polling station.

If you’re into the dynamic underbelly of American election administration, Richard Winger’s Ballot Access News would be a great addition to your newsreader.

The Boston Globe has an interesting article on the role of bullet voting in Boston local elections.

Four of 13 city council seats are elected at-large. Seeking bullet votes to at-large seats is a semi-effective way for political minorities to marshal citywide support and win seats. As a strategy, bullet voting involves using less than one’s full voting strength. In other words, the voter ‘withholds’ votes from all but the most preferred candidate. Bullet votes seem to be the norm in Boston:

In the last election for Boston City Council, each ballot contained an average of 2.9 votes for at-large seats.

Parts of the article suggest that some view the practice in a negative light. At any rate, there’s a hint of how STV could preserve the benefits of and eliminate many of the problems with bullet voting.

The danger is when voters don’t use one of their votes for a popular candidate they support, gambling that that candidate will win anyway. If enough voters make that same calculation, the candidate could lose.

(In Cambridge’s more complex electoral system, however, mathematicians say there is no value to bullet voting. Voters rank the order of their votes, so their first-choice candidate automatically receives a boost over others they may choose but give lower ranks.)

From 1938 to 1967, Massachusetts cities could adopt proportional representation for local elections. Plan E was one of six state-sanctioned charter formats, this one mandating council-manager government with PR elections and no party primaries.

For the Globe, effective bullet voting has high search and info costs:

But deciding whether you should cast a single ballot for your first-choice candidate, mathematicians say, you have to make strategic judgments about the race and how others will vote. And that requires a sophisticated view of the election.

With PR-STV and Plan E, everybody basically bullet votes. Surplus transfers and eliminations increase one’s likelihood of casting an effective vote absent tortuous calculation about whom to rank first.

This would have been a more detailed discussion, but the better Times of Malta piece is inaccessible due to site maintenance.

In any event, Malta has used the single transferable vote in 5-seat districts for elections to its House of Representatives since the 1920s. Apparently since 1987, it has tinkered with the specifics of seat allocation. Recent developments:

The Maltese Parliament on Wednesday night approved changes in the Maltese Constitution that cater for significant changes in general elections. Gozo will remain a single unified electoral district while strict proportionality between the number of first preferences and the number of seats obtained will be guaranteed when two parties are elected.

STV seeks to guarantee proportionality of seat shares to support for factions through surplus transfers and eliminations, that is, by minimizing wasted votes. Each seat in the district corresponds to a quota of votes. Votes in excess of the quota are transferred to voters’ next-preferred candidates. There are different ways of determining the quota, two being the Hare and Droop methods.

Without knowledge of context or, perhaps, some deeper understanding of micro-dynamics, it’s hard to tell what change would effect “strict proportionality.” Thoughts?

I hope the other site comes back online soon.

There is a bill on Gov. Schwarzenegger’s desk to legalize the single transferable vote for use in California’s municipal elections. San Francisco already uses it (albeit a single-winner variant), and there’s a formidable reform movement in the state centered around the Californians for Electoral Reform. But, for most towns, STV is illegal.

This bill is important in that most local jurisdictions are not able to use ranked voting systems under current law, and this bill would permit them to do so. Today only charter counties or charter cities can use IRV, but over three-fourths of cities and counties are general law jurisdictions and don’t have these options. Over half of Californians live in a general law city, a general law county, or both. AB 1294 would give these jurisdictions these additional options, but would not mandate that any jurisdictions use these systems. In other words, it is simply permissive and gives local governments the tools they need to respond to the wishes of their voters.

STV, often called choice voting and, for single-winner elections, instant runoff voting, has an interesting history in the United States. By the end of the Progressive Era, some two dozen municipalities were using it to elect their local councils. By the 1950s, opponents began capitalizing on racism and McCarthyism in a series of repeal measures. STV as an available city plan was shortly eliminated from the Massachusetts state constitution with Cambridge grandfathered in. Following elimination of the New York City school board in 2002, Cambridge became the last STV town in America.

Residents of Davis, CA supported STV/choice voting by 55% in an advisory referendum last November. By signing California’s AB 1294, Governor Arnold can reopen a long-closed wing of America’s democracy laboratory.

Academics at the Universidad Francisco Marroquin in Guatemala on August 14 invited FairVote Executive Director Rob Richie to talk about instant runoff voting (IRV) as a potential reform of presidential elections in that country.

Also known as preferential voting and the alternative vote, IRV lets voters rank candidates in order of preference. If no candidate has a majority of first choices, the candidate with the fewest votes is eliminated, and votes for that candidate are reallocated to his/her supporters’ second choices. In Guatemala, the system is called Elecciones por Rondas Instantáneas, or ERI.

IRV can be used to maximize effective votes, reduce spoiler dynamics and produce majority winners on a single, high-turnout election day.

IRV is typically a replacement for single-winner plurality elections where more than two candidates can result in non-majority winners. Where instant runoff has passed local-level referenda in the U.S., this has been the norm. Other jurisdictions, however, have replaced two-round systems with IRV.

Richie’s talk represents international-level interest in correcting the defects in two-round systems. Guatemala uses such a system. A principal defect in the TRS is lower turnout in the decisive runoff round (where voting is not compulsory). Two-round systems are also subject to spoiler dynamics, however. A good example is the French presidenital election of 2002. Despite a left-of-center consensus among voters, Jean-Marie Le Pen faced off with Jacques Chirac in the runoff round. Le Pen’s vote share increased by barely a point - from 16.9% in the first round to 17.8% in the second. With instant runoff voting, the runoff likely would have been between two left-leaning contenders.

See: Rob Richie habló sobre Elecciones por Rondas Instantánea