Getting More Bang for Your Ballot

Seeking true democracy, backers of proportional representation want to change the way members of the Seattle City Council are elected.

by Herm Ross
Free Press contributor

In September 1994, Citizens for Proportional Representation (CPR) launched a signature gathering effort to put a proposition on the ballot to change the way we elect our city officials. This effort, which might well be Seattle's longest-running ballot issue campaign, is still going on. Backers hope that a new system of elections would open up the political system to more voices, reduce negativism in campaigns, and allow for more effective representation of voter interests.

Currently, our city officials are elected by the winner-take-all method, the system used in most places around the country at every level of government. Under winner-take-all, a primary election usually narrows down the candidates to two for each seat. In the general election, the candidate garnering the most votes wins, even if the opponent pulls 49.9 percent of the vote.
Imagine the scenario in any given city's city council (or any given state's Congressional delegation or state legislature) when two large parties vie for every seat, facing off against each other in the general election. If the city is 50.1 percent Party-A sympathetic, then the Party A candidates will win every seat, resulting in a legislative body that is 100 percent Party A, even though they comprise only half of the electorate.
Case in point: In the 1992 Washington State Congressional elections, Democrats pulled 56 percent of the state-wide vote, yet won eight out of the nine seats or 88 percent of the seats. Just two years later, and without much demographic change, Democrats pulled 49.9 percent of the state-wide vote, yet won only 22 percent of the seats. In each instance, the outcome was unrepresentative of the voters and rewarded landslide victories where none existed.
Winner-take-all is why a 6 percent shift by swing voters can create a 66 percent shift in party representation. Also troubling is that, despite voter dissatisfaction and moves for new parties, the chance for an alternative viewpoint, be it Green, Labor, Socialist, what have you, are very slim with our current prohibitive 50.1 percent threshold to win a seat.
This is why CPR is proposing proportional representation-or PR-for the Seattle City Council. Here's how it works: With PR, rather than needing 50.1 percent of the city-wide vote to win a council seat, a candidate would need only one-ninth (11 percent) of the city-wide vote to win one of the nine seats. If Party-A type candidates pull 55 percent of the vote, they win 55 percent of the seats, not 100 percent. If Labor candidates pull 22 percent of the vote, they win 22 percent of the seats, thus making a legislative body that is an accurate reflection of the electorate.
Another important aspect of PR is that it would reverse our deplorable tendency toward mud-slinging. Under PR, candidates for Council will not be pitted in two-person races for single-member positions; all candidates will simply run for the Council. Voters will rank their choices (from most- to least-favorite) and the nine top vote-getters win the nine seats.

Taking it to the People
Though a novel concept to most Americans, PR is used in most every democracy in the world and even enjoyed several decades of use in about 25 cities throughout the US from the 1920s to the 1950s. It was abolished most everywhere (except Cambridge, Mass., where it now has over 50 years of history) because of the perceived threat to the two major parties. PR was seen as subversive by some because it finally allowed smaller parties and ethnic minorities to win a few seats.

A distaste for our whole electoral process and the alienation of vast numbers of would-be voters necessitates an enlightened election system. In the 1980s, then-NAACP Legal Defense Fund litigator Lani Gunier argued cases that resulted in the implementation of semi-proportional systems in a couple of counties in the rural South where no African-Americans had served on county councils in over a century.
Currently, efforts for PR are also under way in Eugene, Ore., San Francisco, as well as on the national level to allow states the option to elect their Congressional delegations by PR (House Bill 2545).
The all-volunteer CPR (public disclosure records reveal that their campaign has spent only $1553.75 in 16 months of operation), says that the signature gathering has been an educational process in many ways. Not only is it the primary way of spreading the word about PR and educating the public, but for the signature gatherers themselves it has been a hands-on education in political activism as well as an opportunity to strike up conversations with strangers and gauge the rather alarming rate of apathy and discontent.
CPR organizers are hoping that more people will join the signature gathering campaign, working street corners, movie lines, and all the festivals that will take place throughout the summer. With 18,000 signatures gathered to date, they are already half the way to their goal. They emphasize that if you believe in a fair, multi-party-style government, you have to work to change our system.

Herm Ross is a CPR volunteer.

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Contents on this page were published in the April/May, 1996 edition of the Washington Free Press.
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