by Jack Santucci
I have started a bibliography of recent, empirical, and peer-reviewed work on ranked-choice voting.
My hope is that the page will be useful to policymakers and researchers. So far, it covers burdens on voters, burdens on election officials, effects on candidates and parties, causes of adoption/repeal, and book-length historical accounts.
Please reach out if you have something to add.
What did ballots look like in American single transferable vote elections? I can’t find examples, so I am licensing these photos for public use. The ballots are from Worcester, Massachusetts, which held six PR elections, 1949-59. Please tell me if you know of PR ballots from other cities.
One possible bug in ranked-choice voting is the duration of a vote count. This is especially true in the proportional representation (PR) form, since ballots may move around a lot more than in “instant-runoff voting.” Many used to suggest that painful vote counts were a cause of PR’s repeal. This claim resurfaced yesterday in a private exchange about Al Southwick’s piece on PR in Worcester, Mass. Southwick writes:
Is the single transferable vote a form of proportional representation? Right now I believe it is. A reviewer once said the fight had been won. Either way, this issue stops some of my talks dead in their tracks. Some are bothered that PR might coexist with candidate-based ballots.
If you are reading this, you know that 24 U.S. cities tried the STV form of proportional representation. Here is an updated chart summarizing those episodes.
The changes include:
1) Cropping to 1965, since events thereafter are basically chartjunk.
2) Adding a failed 1959 repeal attempt for Worcester, MA.
3) Changing the dates for Oak Ridge, TN, which evidence suggests to have emerged with STV a decade later than I thought. Note that the Oak Ridge council was “advisory,” whatever that means.
4) Adding Norris, TN, which I had not included because I could not find the dates of any STV elections. This Town Council was also “advisory.” Elections were held annually from 1937 through 1945. I cannot find evidence of an STV election post-1945. The federal government sold Norris to a developer in 1948, and Tennessee granted Norris its own charter in 1949.
5) Date-stamping, since this chart may evolve gain.
Please share any suggested, further changes. Wouldn’t it be nice if our state and local politics were better documented?