On October 26, the city of Lake Park, Florida, settled a Voting Rights Act lawsuit that had been filed by the U.S. Justice Department, and agreed to elect its four city commissioners using Limited Voting. Although four commissioners will be elected at each future election, voters will be able to vote for only one candidate. Lake Park is 48% black, but since it was incorporated in 1923, no black candidate has ever won an election to the commission. In the 2000 census, 14% of Lake Park’s residents are of Haitian origin, and 6% are of Jamaican origin. Lake Park is in Palm Beach County. See the settlement details here. Thanks to Rob Richie for this news.
The lawyer and judge MORONS in these types of cases are NOT able to detect —
TOTAL VOTES / TOTAL SEATS = EQUAL VOTES for each seat winner.
P.R. Now — regardless of every MORON lawyer and judge on Mother Earth.
Lake Park had fewer than 500 people until the 1960 census when it septupled to 3589 persons, all white. The population doubled to 6993 and was about the same size for the next two decades, before increasing to 8721 in 2000.
The population was 9% black in 1980, and 21% in 1990.
87% of the white population was adult vs. 63% for blacks.
Currently the four commissioners are elected for 3-year terms with two elected one year, and one each in the the subsequent years. It appears the DOJ had sought district elections. The consent decree says the DOJ and the Town stipulated that if the case went to trial they agreed that the DOJ would prove that two compact black majority VAP districts could be drawn under a hypothetical 4-district plan.
This solution is actually not that bad in this scenario for a semi-proportional system. Keep in mind that a system is more proportional the lower the threshold is.
Limited Vote Threshold: Votes_Allowed/(Votes_Allowed+Seats)
1/(1+4)= 0.2
Single Transferable Vote Threshold:
100/(Seats+1)
100/(4+1)= 0.2
So that’s pretty nice to match STV. It’s difficult to get too proportional of a system with only four at large seats. This is a vast difference compared to giving whomever had the plurality all the seats, which is the norm under our traditional bloc/multi-memember plurality.
The down side is you can get vote splitting still, so fielding candidates can be tricky. Also, you still get wasted votes since limited voting doesn’t account for over or underflow votes for a candidate. STV addresses both those issues far better.