This week, Port Chester, New York, will use cumulative voting for its village trustee elections. This will be the first time cumulative voting has been used in New York state. Port Chester is in Westchester County, just north of New York city. See this story.
Port Chester was sued in 2006 under the federal Voting Rights Act. It has a substantial Hispanic minority, but under the village’s at-large elections, no one from that community ever won. Cumulative voting gives each voter a clump of votes, perhaps three, perhaps four, sometimes even five. Each voter is then free to spread his or her votes around to different candidates, or to give them all to a single candidate, or something in between.
Port Chester even allows fusion, so you can split your votes between two parties for the same candidate.
There are 6 seats on the board of trustees, and each voter gets 6 votes. The Republicans are running 6 candidates, who are also cross-listed on another ticket. The Democrats are running 4 candidates, the Conservatives 1, and there are 2 independents (though some of them have a party designation).
It will be interesting how the party slating works out. If Republican supporters simply vote for one across the board, they could end up getting nothing. The Democrats may be hoping for voters to give 1 to each candidate and then plug in an extra vote for a couple of them, which could elect all 4 if the extra votes were random.
One reason that there have been no Hispanics elected is that there share of the citizen voting age population is much less than their share of the population (the three Hispanic candidates were all born in different South American countries).
Elections in Port Chester have been under injunction since 2007, and most of the board of trustees is either serving past the end of their elected terms or appointed to the their position. Apparently the judge simply enjoined the elections, and then fell asleep, and someone had to nudge him to approve cumulative voting. The DOJ wanted single member racial gerrymanders.
The “village” has over 25,000 persons.
Cumulative voting is often used by corporations because it can boost the ability of minority shareholders to vote in concentrated blocs and get at least some representation on a board. (Though not as much as PR, generally, I think.)
It will be interesting to see what the DoJ says if none of the Hispanics are elected after the DoJ forced the Village to change its voting procedure. I don’t recall ever reading in these lawsuits if there has been a comparison done on voting success versus money spent campagning. They just assume that the person DESERVES to be elected if they are of the minority race or ethnicity. Which is a very exclusionary viewpoint.
This is somewhat analogous to third party candidates being outspent by 20 to 100 times or more for Congress or legislative races. Without a major scandal or already being very well-known in the District the voting population has no way to know whether they should support that candidate.
Total Votes / Total Seats = EQUAL votes needed for each seat winner.
Much too difficult for the armies of MORON judges and lawyers involved to understand.
#3 The Republicans and Democrats each have a Hispanic candidate. A 3rd Hispanic candidate failed to qualify for the ballot, and is running as a write-in candidate. He has been passing out flyers explaining how to write in his name 6 times.
They are using old-style mechanical behemoths, so each candidate has 6 levers assigned to him in a column. The 6 Republicans are running under a second ticket, so they each have 2 columns, one for each party.
To write-in you move a slider which exposes a roll of paper which you write the name in, and then when the vote is registered the roll advances.
Deemer (#3), the Voting Rights Act and its enforcement mechanisms do not assume that anyone deserves to be elected because her skin is a certain color. What they do recognize is that plurality voting in multi-member districts often has the same result as poll taxes and literacy tests, and that it used to have the same motive. Because the Constitution protects the right to vote against discrimination based on race (and singles out racial minorities for good historical reasons), plurality at large is automatically suspect. If black or Hispanic voters prefer prefer certain candidates, and are numerous enough to elect their choice of candidates under a proportional voting rule, but are prevented from doing so by a winner-take-all rule, then the voting rule is discriminatory.
If this same principle were applied to ideological minorities, we would have proportional representation.
Cumulative voting is far from the best solution to the problems of plurality-at-large and the problems of single-member districts. STV is much better. But cumulative voting is better than no reform at all.
Amendment to #6: I wrote that plurality voting “used to have the same motive” as poll taxes and literacy tests. I should have added, “and in specific instances probably still does”.