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Category: Politics

All posts related to politics.

Potential collision of “voter choice” and “majority rule”

Tomorrow is the in-person primary election in New York City. Polls variously expect Andrew Cuomo and Zohran Mamdani to win the Democratic mayoral nomination. In the background, the city’s charter commission is considering an overhaul of the mayoral electoral system. TLDR: one proposal would mandate two-candidate general elections.

We will see what happens in the primary. I wrote about the situation here.

For me, this episode underscores a tension in the world of electoral reform. On the one hand, many of these devices promise “majority rule.” On the other, they promise to make it easier to run for office without expectation of majority support. Some are drawn by the former idea, others by the latter.

If you are looking for a term to describe the form of RCV that the situation might bring forth, one option is “bottoms-up.” I wrote about it in this 2021 journal article.

Report on Portland’s first STV election

I have a new report with Kevin Kosar and Jaehun Lee of the American Enterprise Institute:

Key Points 

  • Portland, Oregon, used its decennial charter revision process to overhaul its method for electing the city’s legislators in 2022. 
  • The new system divided the city into four districts, with each district represented by three members selected through ranked ballots. 
  • Portland first used this new system in November 2024, and initial analysis indicates that it expanded the representativeness of the candidate pool and resultant council.
Read more…

Block-preferential (or sequential) RCV is out in Heber City, UT

The local Park Record has a story here.

Here is a 2023 blog post on a “downward cascade” process in that year’s election results.

I wrote about this system in a 2021 article, which also covered its historical use in Australia and similar rules at other times in the U.S.

McCune et al. (2024) have an interesting article using the block-preferential (or “sequential”) procedure to show how it would change observed results under Scottish STV.

One alternative to outright repeal would be to replace the system with a “bottom-up” RCV allocation. The issue in Utah has been multiseat districts, which formerly were combined with runoffs.

Numbered-post versus at-large elections

I have run into confusion about this several times over the past few years. Both are forms of “at-large” election in the sense that they can award the largest organized group every seat in a district (usually but not necessarily the city). Here is how that works.

Take a district of three seats. There are two ways to fill the seats. One is to declare elected the people with the three highest vote totals. This is an “an-large” election in the form of multiple non-transferable vote (MNTV).

Another is to give each seat a number (one, two, or three) and make each candidate choose a number. Then let each voter vote individually for each seat. Then declare elected the highest vote getter under each number.

The MNTV ballot might look as follows:

CandidateVote for three with X marks below.
Bob
Sue
Phil
Amy
Juan
Dani

The numbered-post ballot might look as follows:

CandidateVote for one per seat with X marks below.
Seat 1
Bob
Sue
Seat 2
Phil
Amy
Seat 3
Juan
Dani

If Bob, Phil, and Juan get more votes with the first ballot than the other candidates, they win (MNTV or normal at-large).

If Bob gets the most votes for seat 1, Phil gets the most votes for seat 2, and Juan gets the most votes for seat 3, they all win (numbered post).

Both systems therefore can produce the same result in the presence of a cohesive plurality. However, they do so differently, and that difference can be combined (or not) with other institutional designs.