Election Systems
LWVS Every Member Tool for
December 2000
January 2001
The various election systems used throughout the world can be divided
into three families: Plurality-Majority, Proportional and Semi-Proportional.
Each family has its own characteristics, advantages and disadvantages.
We will spend most of our time on systems used for electing legislative
bodies, such as the state legislature, city councils and school boards.
All three families of systems can be used for these elections. For executive
offices, such as governor or mayor, only the Plurality-Majority family
can be used.
Plurality-Majority Family
Single Member Plurality (SMP):
This is the system we use to elect our congressional representatives,
the California Legislature, and many city councils and school boards.
As the name indicates, it has two main characteristics. Candidates run
for a single seat in a geographically defined district. The candidate
who receives the most votes, a plurality, not necessarily a majority,
wins.
Advantages: Voters find it very easy to use. The winner is the one with
the most votes. Election administrators feel very comfortable with the
details of this process, which includes designing the ballots, counting
the votes, and so on. SMP is a geographically based system.
Each representative is beholden to a specific geographical area and
issues that are important to a particular neighborhood or region are
sure to have a champion.
SMP tends to produce large numbers of seats considered safe, where one
party has a significant majority and its candidates are easily and routinely
elected. Many safe seats are the intentional products of the well-known
process of gerrymandering. In either case, one party has an essential
monopoly. In some of these districts, the dominant party's
candidates often run unopposed. Since plurality-majority systems
were designed to represent majorities and pluralities, in many cases
they may leave racial and ethnic minorities under-represented. In fact,
it is the failure of these systems to provide diversity in representation
that has prompted much of the growing interest in alternative voting
systems on the part of some minority voting rights advocates and judges
hearing cases involving the Voting Rights Act.
Two-Round Run-off System
In California this is used in many local jurisdictions. The method is
simple: if no candidate gets a majority of the votes in an election,
all except the top two vote getters are eliminated and the remaining
two candidates compete in a second election, usually from a month to
several months later.
The advantage of this system is that the winner has to be elected by
a majority, while it has the disadvantage of requiring a costly second
election. Almost always the voter turnout is lower in the second election,
unless it happens to be consolidated with a general election.
Instant Run-off Voting:
The other majority system we will consider is instant run-off voting,
or IRV. Although it has never been used in public elections in this
country, it has drawn increasing interest in recent years here, especially
among League members. The Vermont State League has adopted a position,
based on member consensus, recommending the use of IRV for elections
at the state level, and several local Leagues in California have recently
done the same for local elections. In 1998 voters in Santa Clara County
approved a charter amendment to allow the use of IRV once the technology
is available.
In an IRV election voters rank the candidates in their order of preference.
On a paper ballot you would mark '1' after the name of your first choice,
'2' for your second choice, and so on. You need not rank all of the
candidates but if you don't you may forfeit some of your influence on
the outcome of the election.
Votes are counted. If no one receives a majority, the lowest ranking
candidate is dropped, and a voter's ballot is cast for their highest-ranking
candidate remaining eligible. If and when your first choice is eliminated,
your vote will go to your next choice. When one candidate has a majority
of the votes the election is decided.
A term we will be using frequently is 'sincere voting.' Political scientists
use this term to describe votes cast for your most preferred candidate;
it is not intended to be subjective or judgmental. Situations in which
sincere voting is an issue most frequently arise when you feel compelled
to vote for a 'lesser evil' candidate instead of the one you really
prefer.
IRV encourages sincere voting, because voters who favor a candidate
who they know can't win can still vote for him or her, secure in the
knowledge that when this candidate is eliminated their vote will be
cast for their second choice.
Some experts maintain that IRV may have the added benefit of discouraging
negative campaigns and 'mud-slinging,' since candidates can benefit
from being the second choices of voters and often these votes can prove
to be the margin of victory.
At-Large Voting:
Now we come to the last of the plurality-majority systems we will consider--at-large
voting. This system is used exclusively at the local level in California
at present. Typically an entire town or city is considered to be one
large district, and all candidates for office run at the same time in
competition with one another. Voters have the same number of votes as
the number of seats to be filled. The candidates with the highest numbers
of votes (a plurality) win.
The advantage most often cited by advocates is the election of candidates
that have citywide support among the voters. At-large representatives
may thus be more likely to advocate what is good for the city as a whole,
as opposed to district representatives who may tend to vote for programs
that benefit their area but that may not be in the best interests of
the entire community.
However, it is quite easy for an ethnic majority, voting cohesively,
to elect an ethnically pure city council or school board. It is this
high potential for racial bias that has caused this system to be increasingly
challenged in the courts as being in violation of the Voting Rights
Act and its amendments.
Gerrymandering is not possible with at-large voting because no district
lines need to be drawn. This is the only member of the plurality-majority
family to escape this problem. This in turn is likely to lead to more
competitive elections and fewer safe seats.
Two other plurality-majority systems which we will not cover because
of lack of time are approval voting, which is not presently used in
any public elections, and combined at-large and single member district
voting, which is used in a few local jurisdictions.
Proportional Representation Family
The Proportional family of election systems has not been used much in
this country but is the most used system in the world among the major
democracies. Only the United States, Canada, Great Britain, France and
India do not use it.
The basic principle of Proportional Representation, commonly referred
to as PR, is that the number of seats a political party or group wins
in a legislature should be in proportion to the amount of its support
among voters. So if a political party wins 30 percent of the vote, it
should receive about 30 percent of the seats. This is in contrast to
winner-take-all systems, where a party receiving 30 percent of the vote
would get no representation.
All PR systems require the use of multi-member districts. Instead of
electing one member of the legislature in each local district, PR uses
larger districts where several members are elected at once. This is
the feature of PR that allows for proportionality, and the larger the
number of seats the more proportional the results will be.
Party List PR
We will first look at 'Party List PR,' even though this is not one of
the systems we will be considering for consensus question 3. However,
because of its simplicity it is a good starting point to explain the
principles of PR, and it is part of one of the systems we will be considering.
Each party puts up a list or slate of candidates equal to the number
of seats in the district. On the ballot, voters indicate their preference
for a particular party, and the parties then receive seats in proportion
to their share of the vote. So in a five-member district, if the Democrats
win 40 percent of the vote, they would win two of the five seats. The
two winning Democratic candidates would be the top two on the party
list.
You may remember our previous discussion of the trade-off between geographical
representation and competitive elections. This choice is presented in
its clearest form by Party List PR, where there is no geographical representation
and very few safe seats. So if you think having a representative associated
with the place you live is an important value, irrespective of that
person's party affiliation, you may not like party list. On the other
hand you may think that in today's mobile society geography is much
less important than it used to be. You may also be attracted by the
idea of being able to elect at least one person of your political point
of view.
Minor parties have a much better chance of being represented in a PR
legislature. In a five-seat district 20 percent of the vote is enough
to win a seat, and with ten seats only 10 percent is required.
If you like the idea of minor parties being represented, that will be
a plus for PR, but if you think the two-party system is best for our
country, it will be a minus.
If no party wins a majority of seats in a legislature, which frequently
happens, two or more parties must form a coalition in order to govern.
In our system, in contrast, one of the two major parties always controls
a legislature. This study is about voting systems, not methods of governance.
Since many governments that use a PR system are also organized under
a parliamentary form of government, some people mistakenly believe that
one is necessary to have the other. That is not the case. If our country
had a PR voting system, our presidential form of government would not
be brought down by a collapse of a coalition, as it would in a parliamentary
system.
Mixed-Member Proportional (MMP):
This proportional system could be considered a hybrid of party list
PR and our single member district system. We are including it in our
consensus question because in recent years it has become one of the
'hottest' systems being considered by countries thinking about a change
in their election systems, and because we believe that if PR ever comes
to this country this is the most likely form, at least at the state
and national level.
A mixed-member proportional ballot is divided in half. In a state election,
on one side you vote for a representative from your district, as in
our present system, and only a plurality is required to win. On the
other side is a party list ballot for a multi-member district, and you
cast your vote for one of the parties. The party list votes are counted
on a statewide basis to determine how many of the legislative seats
each party has earned. These seats are filled first from the local seats
a party has won and the remainder from the regional party lists.
For example, say in a 100-seat legislature the Republicans win 40 percent
of the party list vote. This establishes the number of seats they will
have in the legislature--40. If 28 Republicans have won at the local
level they will take the first 28 seats. The remaining 12 come from
the party lists.
Since the total number of seats for a party is established by the party
list vote, a proportional result for the election as a whole is guaranteed.
The inclusion of single member district seats provides geographical
representation lacking in a pure PR system. Although minor parties would
still have no chance of winning seats at the local level, the party
list vote would give them the same amount of representation they would
obtain in a conventional PR election.
Is mixed-member proportional the best of both worlds? It certainly
has most of the advantages and disadvantages of party list and single
member systems, although to a lesser degree. The single member district
portion is susceptible to gerrymandering and may discourage sincere
voting, while proportionality means that minor parties will be represented
in the legislature and coalition legislatures are likely. Campaigning
in the larger districts may be more costly, although since the vote
is for a party this burden probably wouldn't fall on the candidates.
Choice Voting:
The final member of the proportional family we will consider is choice
voting, also known as the single transferable vote. This is the only
form of PR that has been used in this country, but it is much less popular
in the rest of the world than party list PR. It has the advantage of
being usable for both partisan and nonpartisan elections.
A choice voting ballot resembles the one referred to previously for
instant run-off voting. The candidates in a multi-member district are
listed, with their party affiliations if this is a partisan election,
and voters rank them in order of their preference. On a paper ballot
you would write '1' next to your first choice, '2' for your second and
so on. You can rank as few or as many as you want.
Choice voting is expressly designed to minimize wasted votes. It is
more successful in that regard than any other system, and most voters
contribute to the election of a candidate.
The vote counting procedure is probably the most sophisticated of any
election system. The first step is to determine the threshold of votes
needed to win a seat. This is done by dividing the number of ballots
cast by the number of seats to be filled plus one. One vote is then
added to this result. For example, in a three-seat district with 10,000
voters, a candidate would need 2,501 votes to win. The more seats in
a district, the lower this threshold will be.
Next the first place votes for each candidate are counted. Anyone who
has reached the threshold is declared elected. The excess votes for
that candidate are then transferred to the second choices on the ballot.
This transfer may or may not allow other candidates to reach the threshold
for election.
After all the excess votes are transferred, if there are still seats
to be filled, the candidate with the lowest number of votes is dropped
and the next choice votes from those ballots are transferred in the
same way. Again the votes are counted to see if any more candidates
have reached the threshold. This process of transferring votes from
dropped and winning candidates continues until enough candidates reach
the threshold to fill all of the seats. During this process, voters'
third or fourth choices may help to elect a candidate, even though their
first two choices may have been eliminated.
Choice voting is a well-established election system and you can be assured
that the counting process is legitimate. Its complexity is necessary
to make this a proportional system, in the absence of a party to vote
for. One other drawback is that, like instant run-off voting, its use
would require some jurisdictions to purchase new voting equipment.
Cambridge, MA, now has computers count its choice voting elections.
Although the voting method and the vote counting superficially resemble
those for instant run-off voting, keep in mind that choice voting is
used for electing multiple candidates rather than a single winner. There
is no transfer of surplus votes in instant run-off voting and it produces
a majority winner, while under choice voting candidates representing
a relatively small minority of the community can win.
In partisan choice elections, unlike party list PR or single-member
district voting, a voter can choose among several candidates of the
same party. Choice voting also allows voters to cross party lines with
their rankings. So a Democratic voter might rank a Democratic candidate
first, but then give her number two ranking to a female Republican candidate
that she particularly likes.
Many proponents claim that choice voting discourages the kind of negative
campaigning that has become common in single-member district contests.
Choice voting candidates, like instant run-off candidates, can benefit
from being the second choices of voters.
A main disadvantage of this system is more crowded ballots. With a five-member
district and three parties vying for office, you could easily have 10-12
candidates on a choice ballot. In the absence of party labels,
on what basis will voters make their choices?
In some communities individual groups may be organized sufficiently
to run candidates as a slate, as in at large voting. In the present
winner-take-all system if such a group represented a plurality of the
voters it might succeed in winning all of the seats on a board or council.
With choice voting in such a situation the organized group might still
win a majority of the seats but it is highly unlikely that it would
win them all, even if the opposition was fragmented.
In less organized communities voters could choose to support candidates
on the basis of their personal qualities (leadership, experience, etc.)
or on factors such as political philosophy, positions on issues, ethnic
or gender identity, where they live, etc. Winning candidates may or
may not represent any readily identifiable group of voters. For an individual
voter decisions on how to rank the candidates might involve weighing
the relative importance of these various factors. One possible
strategy for a candidate could involve making a highly targeted appeal
to a relatively small segment of the community, with the goal of receiving
about 20 percent of the first place votes, which would assure election.
This could be done with relatively modest campaign spending. Others
may choose a broader based campaign, hoping to get enough first place
votes to keep them in the running and then pick up transferred votes
from other candidates.
Semi-Proportional Family
Proponents of these systems like to think of them as a practical compromise
between plurality and PR systems. They eliminate some of the problems
of plurality voting, and they produce more proportional results. However,
champions of plurality-majority systems see them as overly complicated
and largely unnecessary reforms that lean too far backwards to try to
accommodate political minorities. Advocates of PR consider semi-proportional
voting to be a crude and unreliable version of PR.
Cumulative Voting:
Semi-proportional systems have never been used in other nations, and
little in this country. We will only consider one of them, cumulative
voting, which was used in Illinois to elect their House of Representatives
from 1870 to 1980. More recently, voting rights advocates have expressed
growing interest in this form of voting. In response to voting rights
suits, several local areas have abandoned plurality-majority systems
and adopted cumulative voting. It is currently used in over 60 jurisdictions
in the U.S., including Amarillo, Texas and Peoria, Illinois.
In a cumulative voting election, candidates run in multi-member districts.
Voters have as many votes as there are seats. Voters cast their votes
for individual candidates and the winners are the ones with the most
votes. The difference is that voters may distribute their votes among
the candidates in any way they choose. For example, if there are seven
seats to be filled, voters can cast all seven for one candidate, one
vote for each of seven candidates, four for one and three for another,
or any other combination.
Clearly under this system minorities, both political and ethnic, can
concentrate their votes on one candidate and have a much better chance
of winning representation than in a plurality-majority system. Cumulative
voting also shares some of the other advantages of PR systems, such
as not being susceptible to gerrymandering and thereby providing more
competitive elections.
Its main disadvantage is that strategic voting is essential if a party
or group of voters wants to maximize their representation. Splitting
of votes between a group's candidates can result in none of them being
elected. Because of this parties may try to give instructions to their
supporters on how to vote, which may or may not be successful. The proportionality
of this system is subject to wide swings from one election to another.
A minority party might get no representation in one election and then
even end up with a majority of the seats in the next, if the votes for
the opposition are split enough.
We will not be considering two other semi-proportional systems, limited
voting and parallel voting, which are used even less than cumulative
voting.
For more resource information visit the League of Women Voters of California
website at this link:Election
Systems
Consensus Questions for the Elections Systems Study 2000-2001
Question 1: How important is each of the following criteria as a feature
of a good election system?
List
of criteria
Question 2: Rank the five most important criteria, in orderfrom 1 to
5, with 1 being the most important.
Question 3A: Which systems best achieve your objectives as reflected
in your preferred criteria for electing multiple members to a representative
body in a single election at the state level (for example, the state
assembly)? Your options are:
- Single member plurality
- Instant run-off voting
- Mixed-member proportional voting
- Choice voting
- Cumulative voting
Question 3B: Which systems best achieve your objectives as reflected
in your preferred criteria for electing multiple members to a representative
body in a single election at the local level (for example, city council
or school board)? Your options are:
- Single member plurality
- Instant run-off voting
- Choice voting
- Cumulative voting
- Two-round run-off
- At-large voting
Question 4: When electing someone to a single office, should the election
system require the winner to obtain a majority of votes?
(A) At the state level (for example, governor)
(B) At the local level (for example, mayor)
Question 5: Should California law be changed to allow voters in a local
jurisdiction to choose their own election system for local elections?
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