by Jack Santucci
Posts related to proportional representation (PR), mostly in the United States.
Rose City Reform unpacks Portland’s 2024 election with Jack Santucci, who wrote a book about the history of Portland’s new voting method.
— Read on rosecityreform.substack.com/p/what-could-we-possibly-learn-from
An emerging narrative holds that ranked-choice voting is in trouble as a cause due to its performance at this year’s general election. It therefore might be useful to look at historical data on the incidence and potential consequences of ‘bad years.’ I don’t see much evidence for the effect of a ‘bad year’ — at least from the perspective of failed adoption.
The data cover efforts to adopt the single transferable vote (STV), in almost all cases alongside the council-manager form of government.1 Close readers will note that this is not the same as what lost earlier this month: instant runoff voting with jungle primaries. I do not have the kind of data you see above for “single-winner” adoptions (i.e., instant runoff), at either the state or local levels. What I can say is:
The data show a string of bad years in the late 1930s. They clearly did not end adoptions; more than half of winning referendums came after. Also, these ‘bad’ years followed a few in which STV did very well.3
Portland (OR) journalist Maja Harris has an interesting post about the surfeit of candidates running in the city’s first STV elections. Does the experience so far reflect the perspective I built to understand Progressive Era adoptions of the same?
Read more…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.)