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Category: Solutions

Ideas for fixing defects in electoral systems as used in or proposed for the U.S.

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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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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Minority-party representation (MPR) to fix gerrymandering

We recommended open-list proportional representation (OLPR) in the 2023 APSA report because we reasoned that MMP was not viable. MMP stands for “mixed-member PR,” a form of proportional representation that includes single-seat districts (SSD). Here is the rationale behind our recommendation, some potential objections to that advice, and a way to resuscitate something like MMP. I will call it minority-party representation (MPR).

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List PR to fix cumulative voting

Cumulative voting is an electoral system in which the voter can give more than one vote to one person. Its purpose is to prevent a district’s largest faction from winning every seat. When parties enter this picture, they face three related problems. One is to decide how many candidates to run. Another is to decide which people these will be. The third is to get voters to mark the general-election ballot in a way that gets the slate elected.

Yesterday, I discovered a paper in which two political scientists propose a way to relieve parties of all three tasks: make a vote for a candidate also count for the party slate, allocate seats to parties in proportion to their vote shares, and give those seats to the candidates with the most votes in each party. This is known in the literature as free-list proportional representation (FLPR).

Cumulative voting famously was used to elect the Illinois lower chamber in three-seat districts, 1870-1980. The context for the above reform proposal seems to have been increasing party factionalism. Saywer and MacRae (1962) refer to party committees’ increasing difficulty in deciding how many candidates to run and who they should be. FLPR would have obviated these dilemmas. Sawyer and MacRae also note that it might have obviated primaries as well.

I also found a paper that mentions a potential majority reversal due to voters’ ballot markings at some point in the 1950s. This paper also notes a gripe that the minority party sometimes had a larger share of seats than its apparent share of votes. I say “apparent” because it is not straightforward to compute a party’s vote share with a multiple-vote rule. FLPR might have helped with these issues too, although the small district magnitude of three would have made it hard to get fine-grained proportionality.