by Jack Santucci
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: