The July 21 Sacramento Bee has this op-ed by Kris Novoselic and Rob Richie, advocating that states and other units of government use either proportional representation, or cumulative voting, or instant runoff voting, instead of the “winner-take-all” system so prevalent in the U.S.
Total Votes / Total Seats = EQUAL votes needed for each seat winner in legislative bodies.
Difficult ONLY for math retards — who love complex schemes.
I’ve read that Pat Quinn is the person most responsible for eliminating cumulative voting in Illinois, and that was his greater accomplishment prior to becoming Rod Blagojevich’s running mate.
There is really no evidence that IRV increases turnout. It didn’t in the San Francisco mayoral election (eg 2003 vs 2007). And if you look at the 2010 results for Supervisor District 10, the turnout for the “instant runoff” in 2010 was less than the conventional runoff in 2000, when you consider all the votes that were discarded.
Jim – the piece is about proportional voting, not instant runoff voting.
That said, it’s indisputable that winners in every instant runoff voting election so far in San Francisco were victorious in elections where turnout was higher than it would have been in a December runoff election. It’s also very likely that nearly all of those winners would have won with fewer votes in those December runoffs than the votes earned in November.
As to Pat Quinn, his leadership in the effort to shrink the legislature by a third and get rid of cumulative voting was in his 20s – he had done a lot since. Most Illinois leaders and reformers think it was a terrible mistake. His Republican opponent in the governor’s race supported bringing back cumulative voting, for example.
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#3 Then when why did the op-ed mention Minneapolis? You’re not going to cite the park board are you?
For the final two candidates in District 10, there were fewer votes cast in the decisive round in November 2010 than there were in December 2000. 20% of ballots were irregularly marked.
BTW, Richard Daley managed to get elected to the Illinois House as a Republican under the cumulative voting system.
#5, Jim:
Minneapolis was a reference to the park board and library board. Of course STV/choice voting’s history in 20th century elections in the US included some much bigger uses for city council, including NY and Cincinnati, and every has a chance to vote in a choice voting elections in Australia, New Zealand, Ireland and Scotland.
I have no idea what your point is about Richard Daley getting on the ballot as a Republican in the 1930s and winning. If that troubles you, seems like you might want to be more worried about the Top 2 system’s failure to uphold association rights.
#5 — As to San Francisco, District 10 in 2000 is the only example you will find of any RCV election in San Francisco to date where the number of votes in a December runoff might have been higher than the turnout in the final round of the RCV tally — this it out of dozens of such RCV races, including a number of races where second and third choices played a role in determining the winner instead of going to a runoff.
So, let’s turn to District 10, this singular example. It had a remarkably fractured field in 2010 where no candidate won more than 12% of first choices. But even in that extreme situation, the valid votes in the final round were 39.9% of all voters at the polls, as opposed to the valid votes in the runoff in December 2000 being 44.4% of all voters at the polls in November. That’s a small difference.
As to so-called irregular ballots, the great majority of those irregularities had no impact on whether those ballots counted. It’s also notable that San Francisco voters had comparable, if not greater trouble, with being asked to vote for three candidates in the at-large school board election using “x-voting.”
It could prove interesting to see if after the 2012 Primary election using the new Assembly District boundaries if substantially different numbers are generated from the primary vote totals under Prop. 14’s new rules.
#6 Figured as much, coming from you. BTW, Minneapolis no longer has a library board. Minneapolis made the mistake of defining their system as “single transferable vote” and the city attorney determined that this really did mean STV for the park board at large members, and that Minneapolis could not use some other system. Though he did let them use the restricted preference choice pioneered by San Francisco with its Butterfly By The Bay Ballot.
You didn’t mention Northern Ireland. Scotland only uses STV for local elections, and in New Zealand the use of STV is quite limited.
Top 2 does interfere the right of voters to associate for purposes of electing political candidates of their choice. I’m not a fan of voter lockouts used in partisan primary systems, or party boss control done in the name of “political association”. And yourself?
#7 The mayoral runoff in 2003 was had higher turnout than the general election. Had the 2003 election been conducted using IRV, turnout for the IRV runoff would have been less than the election.
The turnout for supervisor elections in San Francisco is inflated by being coincident with the general election for president or governor. The same thing happened in 2005. If you compare the 2005 statewide election with the 2002 gubernatorial election, turnout statewide was higher in 2005, than 2002. But the increase was less in San Francisco than in the rest of the state. Do you think that the use of IRV in San Francisco depressed turnout below what it would have been?
In 3 of the 6 supervisor races that went to a runoff in 2000-2002, the 2nd placed candidate in the general election won the runoff. IRV denies the voters an opportunity for a robust debate between the leading contenders.
The 20% irregular ballots in District 10 indicate that voters either did not understand the system, or did not like the restrictions put on them by the Butterfly by The Bay Ballot.
How many irregular ballots were there in the 2010 school board election? When San Francisco was considering instituting school board elections, the League of Women Voters argued that appointed boards were essential to a democracy. Do you agree?