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Category: proportional representation

Posts related to proportional representation (PR), mostly in the United States.

How to have two votes in DC’s at-large elections

There is controversy about the new electoral system in DC. Michael Brice-Saddler reports for the Washington Sun:

For decades, the at-large ballot carried simple instructions: vote for no more than two candidates. Under the new system, voters face a grid prompting them to rank candidates across columns from first to fifth choice. Yet because each ballot contains only one active vote at a time, a voter’s second choice may never be counted.

The new math has forced candidates to reshape their messaging in the home stretch, with contenders aggressively pleading for first-choice votes. The change has also bred friction among voters accustomed to casting two distinct picks, leaving even politically plugged-in residents puzzling over their ballots.

One way for voters to have two “active votes” — or potentially as many as they want — would be to use free-list PR (FLPR). Also known as PR with panachage, FLPR lets voters cast an arbitrarily large number of candidate votes. These then determine how many seats each party gets as well as which candidates get them.

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Do big cities need larger councils?

The DSA and Working Families Party are increasingly active in Democratic primaries and, for cities with nonpartisan ballots, first-round elections. City & State consequently reports that New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s new charter-review commission has been swamped with calls for “open primaries.” Out on the West Coast, however, “open primaries” are producing the same basic results.

I want to suggest that cities like New York and L.A. instead consider increasing the sizes of their councils. Doing so might take some pressure off of Democratic primaries — or what passes for primaries in cities with nonpartisan elections.

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Report: “Understanding How Proportional Representation Might Work in New York City”

John Ketcham and I have a new report out today with the Manhattan Institute. In it, we show that the effective number of electoral parties at the last New York City council election was 3.3. We defend this computation by reference to the seat-product model. Then we simulate two forms of proportional representation: open-list at the borough level, mixed-member PR with a citywide compensation tier of 20 seats.

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Trojan Horse or distraction?

At the Election Law Blog, Rick Pildes describes two rationales for adopting proportional representation (PR) nationally. One of these is anti-gerrymandering. He describes the other as the effort to induce a system of 5-6 political parties. On both, he writes:

There’s another issue to flag about the relationship between these two versions of PR in the rhetoric around reform. I’m concerned that advocates for the second version of PR will draw on the intuitions behind the first version of PR to gain support for the second version. In other words, support for the first version of PR will become a Trojan Horse for the second version.

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Descriptive racial representation and anti-gerrymandering at once

This post follows up on my earlier advice to consider minority-party representation (MPR) as an anti-gerrymandering measure. Its basics are described here and reproduced at the bottom of the post.

This week’s news has been about the potential for new Republican district maps to reduce the number of Black members of the U.S. House of Representatives. MPR can be designed to address that problem too.

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