by Jack Santucci
History and strategy of the movement for proportional voting in America.
I have heard from enough sources that OLPR was about winning the voting-system wars. “Enough” means enough to merit comment.
OLPR was arrived at in several ways:
1) Does what STV does with less administrative headache.
2) Does what STV does while addressing pathologies in its past operation.
3) Has to be the go-to federally because MMP seems unconstitutional.
4) Has to be the go-to generally because “all” agree that closed-list PR is a “nonstarter.”
Have a good Independence Day weekend.
Following up on yesterday’s post, here is a brief statement of the legislative reason for the repeal of the single transferable vote in US history. I have no reason think it would not apply to instant runoff as well. Both are fundamentally STV, and both are being promoted as a way to break up parties.
I have written elsewhere that STV opened the possibility of ‘vote leakage.’ Leakage usually refers to votes cast for one party but that help a different one win seats, via the transfer process.
Connecting this phenomenon to STV repeal required tracking leakage between coalitions, not among parties. New York City illustrates the logic. There, votes were expected to leak among a series of anti-Tammany parties.
In other cases, local parties were formed to keep votes away from the rumps of parties displaced by the reforms. This was a direct response to problems organizing STV-elected legislatures.
It didn’t work in the long run. Below is my go-to image for introducing people to the problem. It gives the percentage of roll-call votes in each legislative term on which some portion of said local party (Citizens’ Plan E Association or CEA in this case) teamed up with the opposition and thus defeated its own party’s position. This is known as a majority roll when we focus on the majority coalition, which the figure does. The link between the roll rate and STV repeal is clear. Chapter 7 here gives a detailed account of this and other such episodes, linking them to vote leakage as well.
Here’s why this is an issue for advocates. Let’s say the point of current reforms is to bring Republican moderates into coalition with Democrats. That would be analogous to the reason for the CEA above. What the graph shows is the reform failing to bind that coalition. It shows the reform eventually doing the opposite of what it was supposed to do.
This is one reason why I recommended party-list systems and maybe ‘fusion voting’ instead of STV and its derivatives. (Others have been equity and ease of implementation.)
What follows is mainly for me, but maybe it is useful.
I would view list-PR adoption as an ‘insulating’ action by a coalition that is hard but not impossible to put together. The same would go for national/widespread imposition of ballot fusion (also see first link).
I am wary of efforts to promote PR for its own sake.
I think we are going to see (or at least hear about) more reform activity than usual in cities and maybe some states. It would be nice to see this go in the “more parties” direction.
I prefer to say “pro-party.” I don’t think that direction has to alter the party system by, say, causing lots of parties to win seats in Congress or run presidential candidates.
Even locally, I am reluctant to say it would be easy to build a pro-party reform coalition.