Proportional Representation: Actual Representation

Stoney Bird is a retired corporate lawyer. He currently serves on the Whatcom Transit Citizens’ Advisory Panel and was one of the leaders of the campaign for a Bellingham City Community Bill of Rights in 2012. Since 2002 he has gotten around by bicycle and bus. He is running for a position on the County Charter Review Commission on a platform that includes proportional representation.

Part 6

This essay began with the January 2014 issue of Whatcom Watch. For an overview of the series, see that issue.

In the July issue, I talked about the winner-take-all system of elections that we have, and its rather severe defects. Just to review, you can see them in the table on the right, together with how a different system of elections called proportional representation overcomes the defects.

As the table at the bottom of this page indicates, the bulk of the robust democracies1 in the world use proportional representation. It is clearly the leading form of elections in the world. For brevity’s sake, we’ll refer to it as PR in the rest of this article.

How Does Proportional Representation Work?

PR in its various forms is by far the most widely adopted form of election for legislative bodies in the robust democracies, and indeed in all democracies. The basic features are that several positions are filled from each electoral district. After that, the various forms of PR diverge. The most widely adopted types are closed party list, open party list and single transferable vote. We’ll take them up in turn.

In all of the PR systems, the points of most interest to voters are:

• They don’t have to avoid voting for a third party candidate for fear that it will throw the election to the candidate that above all they want to avoid — this negates the “lesser of evils” problem.

• Their vote will nearly always be counted towards the election of someone that they favor.

• The election results won’t have been predetermined by the drawing of district lines (with or without gerrymandering).

In the closed party list form of PR, voters choose among the parties. Each party preselects a number of candidates equal to the number of positions to be filled and ranks them. The positions representing the district are filled in proportion to the vote each party receives in the election. For example, if there are five positions to be filled from the district in question, and Party A gets 60 percent of the vote in that district, the first three candidates on Party A’s list will be elected. This form of PR is sometimes criticized, however, for giving so much power to the parties instead of to voters.

In the open party list system, parties prepare their lists of candidates and may or may not rank them, but voters ultimately decide the ranking among a party’s candidates. Instead of voting for a party, they vote for a candidate (whose party simultaneously gets a vote). A party’s proportion of the overall vote determines its share of seats in the legislative body. Which candidates fill the party’s slots are determined through the ranking that the voters created.

A mockup of an open party list ballot is shown in the upper figure on the facing page. In the mock-up, the vote for candidate Larry Ostrowski counts both to raise him in the list of Republican voters and to raise the percentage of seats going to Republicans.

The World’s Choice

The form of PR that has been most widely adopted worldwide is PR with a single transferable vote (PR/STV). The candidates are not selected by the parties, although there may be rules about actually belonging to a party if you wish to put its name beside yours on the ballot. In most of these systems, candidates qualify for the ballot through a petition signed by a relatively small number of registered voters. Voters vote for as many of the candidates as they choose and rank their choices.

The key point of this kind of election system is that someone who gets more votes than a threshold gets in, and the threshold is determined by the number of positions to be elected from the district. The larger the number of positions elected from a district, the lower the threshold and the more fine-grained the resulting representation. For example, if the district elects five candidates, the winning candidates would have to receive at least 20 percent of the vote. If there were ten seats from the district, the threshold percentage would 10 percent.2

What’s more, through a system of transferring surplus votes and votes for candidates who can’t win, pretty much all the votes get counted towards someone who does get in. We’ll get into the technicalities of all that below.

A sample ballot for proportional representation with a single transferable vote appears on the facing page, with the votes circled. In practice, the list of candidates would likely be longer. As you can see, the voter on this sample ballot is not afraid to cast votes for Libertarian candidates out of fear that those votes will reduce the Republican vote and throw the election to a Democrat or a Green. If there is a fairly low threshold, one or both of the Libertarian candidates may get in. And if they don’t, this ballot will likely count towards the election of one of the Republicans.

The same principle would hold true for someone who wanted to vote for Greens, with Democrats as the lower-ranked choices

Counting the Votes

The technical questions that I’m about to discuss are not ones that a voter needs to work through except when the system is being set up – and to make sure of on an ongoing basis. We need to make sure both that the computers doing the vote counting have integrity and that there is a paper trail. These are, of course, big provisos, but then they are required of voters no matter what the system of elections is. There are all sorts of things that computers do in relation to any system of elections, including the one that we currently have. The voters’ only immediate work in a PR/STV election is taking time to evaluate the candidates and then ranking them on the ballot. Computers do the rest.

The first issue is the number of votes that a candidate must receive to be elected. This is usually calculated by dividing the total votes cast by the number of seats. As you will see, the larger the number of seats to be elected from the district, the smaller the threshold will be, and the more the result will reflect the range of views of the voters.3

All first choice votes are counted. If the votes for a candidate (let’s say Candidate A) exceed the threshold, Candidate A is elected. The votes for Candidate A above the threshold (the surplus) are distributed proportionately to the second choices of the people who voted for Candidate A. A second count occurs. If Candidate B now exceeds the threshold, B is elected, and B’s surplus votes are distributed proportionately to the remaining candidates in accordance with the rankings that the voters specified. If at any stage in the counting no new candidate has votes exceeding the threshold, the votes for the lowest ranking candidate are transferred proportionately to the remaining candidates. These cycles continue until all positions are filled.

The Timely Relevance for Whatcom County

The County Council in Whatcom County consists of seven members. All are elected at-large (meaning all the voters in the County get to vote on all the positions).

Six of the positions are divided, two each, among the three County Council Districts, with the requirement that the candidates reside in their respective districts. If there are more than two candidates from a given district, district voters in the primary election decide which two will go to the general election. All six of these positions are voted on by all voters in the county in the general election. The seventh position is elected county-wide in both the primary and the general elections.

For several years, Republicans and Democrats in Whatcom County have jockeyed over whether the members of the County Council should be elected county-wide or by district. The debate between the political parties arises because the Democratic-leaning voters tend to live in Bellingham and in County Council District One, which covers the southern part of the county from central Bellingham out to Acme and Van Zandt. If their vote could be segregated into that one district, then Republican candidates would have better changes in the other two.

One of the proposals of the last County Charter Review Commission (2005) was to make County Council elections by district. The voters approved that change. But voters changed their minds in 2008 and approved an initiative to change the system back to countywide elections.

The Result Either Way is Unrepresentative Government

As I pointed out last month, the results of last year’s County Council election would have changed radically if only 3 percent of the voters had switched to the other candidates. As it was, 47 percent of the people who voted in that election remained unrepresented because they cast their votes for a losing candidate. Both of these features of the election show the defects in the system itself, defects that would be overcome if the County Council were elected through Proportional Representation.

What’s more, the way would be opened for the full range of Whatcomites’ political views to be represented in their County Council. A candidate would have to get a little over 14 percent of the vote in order to get on the Council, and the vibrant variety of Whatcom political life would have its full voice. Elections would include all points of view instead of being systems of exclusion.

We are coming up to another decennial County Charter review. A new County Charter Review Commission will be elected this November. It will conduct its deliberations in the first part of next year and propose changes to the County Charter for approval by the voters in November of 2015.

Let’s use this opportunity to adopt an electoral system that is structured to represent the people. Let’s adopt Proportional Representation.

Endnotes

1. Democracies are considered “robust” in this context if they have a population of at least two million and a 2012 Freedom House Average Freedom Score less than two. Mark Jones, Professor of Political Science at Rice University, http://www.fairvote.org/reforms/fair-representation-voting/PR-in-most-robust-democracies

2. Among countries that have adopted PR/STV, the range in number of seats per district varies considerably. In Ireland, for example, the average number of seats per district is four. In Israel and Iraq, the whole country is the “district” and so the proportionality of representation is very fine-grained.

3. There are other ways of calculating the threshold, but they tend to make the result less proportional. See “Real Choices/New Voices: How Proportional Representation Elections Could Revitalize American Democracy,” by Douglas J. Amy, 2d ed., 2002, p. 259-262 (it is available at the Bellingham Technical College).