by Jack Santucci
Next month, Portland (OR) will announce the winners of its first elections under the single transferable vote (STV), AKA proportional ranked-choice voting. The effort to adopt this reform was, in part, an effort to make city council as diverse as the population it serves.
Will it? Or are other reforms the way to go? Time will tell, but here are some observations in the interim.
Read more…Kevin Kosar of the American Enterprise Institute generously invited me to do a Q&A on the ‘one-vote system’ — and candidate-based forms of list PR in general. The Q&A builds on my recent op-ed in The Philadelphia Inquirer. You can read the Q&A here.
There’s a tendency in reform circles to ask too much of voters. I’m thinking here of elaborate schemes like RCV, STAR (Score Then Automatic Runoff), and approval. Ballot reforms like these basically ask voters to pick a better coalition. One-vote flips that around — give voters representation, then have their representatives form the coalition. It’s a lot more realistic.