top of page
Tom Monto

Seattle's recent electoral reform, to runoff elections

Seattle has diverse city council (as mentioned in the blog about Kshama Sawant).


It was perhaps coincidental that Seattle's diverse council is the result of the first time council members were at least partially elected by wards in more than 100 years. I say it may be coincidental because certainly FPTP contests in single-member wards do little for diversity in Edmonton today.


But the Seattle councils, elected through runoff FPTP district elections since 2015, are far more mixed and diverse than those elected in Edmonton when it filled seats through Block Voting in at-large elections, and is perhaps more diverse than the councils Seattle had when the largest block in the city could - and probably often did - elect the winner in each and every of the separate contests, taking all the city-wide seats.


Too bad, though that Seattle had not simply retained the old at-large district, put all the separate contests together to make one multi-member contest, and ensured the strength and effectiveness of the vote by having each voter cast only one in total (instead of one in each of several separate contests).


Those changes would have produced Single Non-Transferable Voting, which would have ensured mixed roughly proportional representation.


If the votes were transferable (ranked choice voting), STV would have been produced.


Either of these options would have produced more representational city councils, instead of the now-current district by district electioneering. The present system deprives the minority in each geographical district of any representation at all. Although the run-off system reduces wastage compared to simple FPTP, still often 45 to 30 percent of the votes in each district are wasted, a larger amount than would be wasted under STV.


========================================================

Here's breakdown of one of the ward elections in 2015:



Ward 1. Primary August 2015

Lisa Herbold 5234 30 p.c.

Shannon Baraddock 4824 28 p.c.

Tavel 3156 18 p.c.

Thomas 1765 10 p.c.

and many more with fewer votes

17,728 votes in total

(Eligible voters -- 60,474

Turnout -- 29 p.c.)



Ward 1. General election "the runoff" November 2015

Lisa Herbold 12,459

Shannon Baraddock 12,420

24,879 votes in total


About 6000 more votes cast than in the primary. (For all we know, with only 29 percent turnout in the primary, all these 24,000 voters could have been different from those who cast votes in the primary.)


About half the votes in the Ward 1 "general election" were wasted, not used to elect anyone.

A person with only 30 percent support initially was elected in the end.


That person received barely more than half the votes in the general election.


Of course, with only one seat, no proportionality is possible.


And much waste is usual in any single-seat district scheme.


Under SNTV, if the same district had elected three seats (which admittedly is just a flight of fancy) the three front runners in the primary (taken as first count) would have been elected. Thus, 76 percent of the voters would have found representation.

===============================================================


Perhaps New York's upcoming move to use Alternative Voting will lead both it and Seattle to move to STV eventually.


===========

Thanks for reading.

=====================================================

2 views

Recent Posts

See All

Early Labour culture

Clarissa Mackie "Elizabeth's Pride A Labor Day story"    Bellevue Times Dec. 5, 1913

Comments


bottom of page