[Summit] Proportional Representation

[Paul Klinkman]

I strongly support proportional representation.  PR has a good history of use in the early 20th century in American cities.  I believe that PR has a history of
–Fighting city hall corruption
–Ending mudslinging in elections, because mudslinging only works when you have two candidates
–Causing candidates to discuss real election issues in great detail, in order to win votes, and
–If not reducing the average cost of running for city council, at least reducing the influence of outside PAC money.

Installing proportional representation is far more valuable to the City of Providence than installing any particular set of politicians.
Proportional representation has two problems, which aren’t exactly problems.
–It lets various minorities have a small amount of power.  Sharing any power with people of color was wildly distasteful in the racially charged early 20th century.
–It fights corruption.  In city after American city, entrenched corrupt interests poured huge amounts of money into revoke elections, in order to get their personal gravy trains back on track.  Cambridge, perhaps the sole survivor, has survived five revoke elections in 66 years.  

Cambridge’s specific type of Proportional Representation has one small election-day problem.  The order in which the votes are hand-counted can theoretically (it hasn’t happened yet) throw the election randomly one way or another between two candidates.  This primitive way of counting can be fixed, but it’s a slightly harder method of accounting, and that requires the trust of voters.

In other news, I have nothing good to say about creating winner-take-all at-large seats on the Providence City Council.  
Yours,
–Paul Klinkman, Liberty Goodwin’s husband.

on 6/6/08 8:10 AM, Kate Sanders at katesndrs at yahoo.com
 wrote:

> In Cambridge, they have a system called "proportional
> voting" that's been in the news lately. The way it
> works in practice is that you write down an ordered
> list of your preferences for City Council:
>
> 1. Jane Smith
> 2. John Doe
> 3. etc.
>
> for as many names as you like to include. If your
> first choice doesn't win, your vote gets counted for
> your second choice, and if your second choice doesn't
> win, your vote counts for your third choice, etc.
>
> Still has the same disadvantage that it costs more to
> campaign city-wide. On the upside, as many people have
> pointed out,it takes away the argument that you're
> "throwing away your vote" on a candidate. You put your
> first choice first, and if they don't win, your vote
> is reassigned to your second choice. Moreover, your
> second choice knows where his or her votes came from.
> So Gore could have won, but with a block of votes that
> transferred from Nader (for example).
>
> Some advantages that I noticed while I was living in
> Cambridge, about 20 years ago now.
>  (1) This strategy encourages candidates to run
> together, and to stress the issues they have in common
> rather than their personalities. That way, candidates
> can get spillover votes from their allies.
> (2) Local organizations such as the Summit
> Neighborhood Association would endorse a group of
> candidates, stressing the ideas they share and how
> those ideas would be beneficial.
> (3) New candidates get into the game more easily, by
> being introduced by more well-known candidates. ("If
> you like me, vote for this new person and make me your
> second choice.") And these alliances can be built
> around issues.
> (4) Although it would be easy enough to write a
> computer program to compute the votes, they always did
> it by hand, at least years ago when I lived there. It
> was quite a community event to go to the school gym
> and watch them counting the votes, and there was
> always a crowd there.
>
> Not sure how this would work here, but I'd prefer it
> to at-large representation.
>
> Kate
>