Cincinnati Ohio
After decades of poltical control by the Republican machine, Cincinnati voters voted in 1924 to move to STV at-large, dropping both single-member wards and the old FPTP method (Block voting was used to elect six members at-large, just as unfairly as the FPTP ward contests.)
in the six elections prior to 1924, where 192 councillors had been elected, the machine had taken all but five of the seats.
Under PR, the City Charter Committee faced off on roughly equal terms against the Republicans, and power seesawed back and forth with most city councils seeing one party take 5 to the other's 4 again and again.
Blacks were able to be elected under STV. (see below)
Women also had successes under STV.
without STV, when STV was abandoned in 1959, the only woman on council lost her seat.
Excerpt from Richard Engstrom's "Cincinnati's 1988 PR Initiative" (online)
"The PR system in Cincinnati, as elsewhere in the United States, was under persistent attack. The 1957 vote to repeal it was the fifth referendum in which voters were asked to abandon the system. The other repeal efforts occurred in 1936,
1939, 1947 and 1954. These referendums generally stimulated vitriolic campaigns (both for and against PR) and the votes were usually exceptionally close (see Table 2).” The opponents of PR recited the usual arguments against it, for example, that it was too complex for voters and too expensive to administer, that outcomes were partiaily the result of chance or random factors, that it encouraged bloc voting along racial, ethnic, and religious lines, and that it could result in the election of ‘crackpot’ or fringe candidates and a fractionalized city council. Supporters of PR generally cited the fact that under PR Cincinnati had a strong two-party system, a fair translation of votes into seats, and effective representation of minority groups (for greater detail on these campaigns, see Straetz, 1958:passim).
One minority group in particular that had gained representation during the STV elections was Cincinnati’s Black voters.
No Black person had ever been elected to the council prior to the adoption of PR. The first Black was elected in the STV vote of 1931. A Black was also elected in the 1935 and 1937 elections. Blacks were then elected in each of the last eight elections conducted through STV, from 1941 through 1955, with two elected in both 1949 and 1951 (Reed, Reed and Straetz, 1957:31).
The Black percentage of the population during this time, as measured by the decennial census, was 10.6 in 1930, 12.2 in 1940, and 15.5 in 1950, (the percentage of the voting age population was 10.3, 11.5, and 14.9, respectively).
Blacks therefore had attained roughly, and sometimes better than, proportional representation for about two-and-a-half decades under PR.
Racial antagonism is widely regarded to have been the critical or decisive factor in the abandonment of PR. As reported in Table 2, the STV system had survived, by close votes, four efforts at repeal, including one as late as 1954. In 1957 however, PR was defeated by a margin of about 10 percentage points. This shift in voter support is often attributed to a fear that, if the system were not changed, Cincinnati would soon have a Black mayor.
As in many council-manager systems, the mayor was selected by the council from among its own members. In 1953 and then again in 1955, the Charterites won a majority of the seats and therefore controlled this selection. In both elections, the only Charter candidate to be elected on the first count of the ballots was Theodore Berry, a Black. Although Berry was not named mayor, his status as the leading vote getter within the majority party was widely viewed as a basis for his asserting a powerful claim on that position.
In what has been described as ‘an underground racist campaign’ (Taft, 1971:X), the possibility of a Black mayor was made an issue in the 1957 repeal effort.
STV is widely believed to have been dropped in Cincinnati to preclude this from happening." (p. 218-220)
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