"Bills are being proposed across the U.S. to scrap the First Past the Post"
by Doug Cowan
(from the newsletter of the Electoral Reform League (U.K.), February 2021)
Electoral reform is gaining momentum across the USA as an impressive number of state legislatures are considering reforming their local and statewide elections.
So far, 30 bills to scrap First Past the Post and bring in [Alternative Voting] (called Ranked Choice Voting or RCV in the US) have already been put forward in states and cities across the country.
Our friends at FairVote, the leading campaigners for electoral reform in the USA, have created a legislation tracker to keep tabs on the progress of the bills.
There is a long history of preferential voting in the USA, in both its single winner incarnation (that we call the Alternative Vote) and multi-winner (that we call the Single Transferable Vote). Between 1915 and 1936, two dozen US cities adopted STV for their local elections. Gradually many re-imposed first past the post, not because it did not live up to its supporters’ claims – it was rejected because it did. [Cambridge, Massachussetts still uses STV for its city elections.]
The preferential voting revival picked up speed when Maine voted to adopt its single winner incarnation in 2016.
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[Here are the details as of 2016:
Ranked voting is already used in San Francisco and Portland, and helped to seed the idea of electoral reform among the public. In 2016, a majority of Maine voters voted in favour of using Alternative Voting. This is the first successful state-wide effort for a fairer voting system at the federal level in the U.S. So far, that is. It means that Maine is set to adopt AV for all its 2018 elections for the U.S. Senate, U.S. House, the governor and the state legislature, following a series of elections where governors and other individuals have repeatedly won on under 50 percent of the popular vote.
There’s more good news. Benton County, Oregon, has also voted to adopt [Alternative Voting] in what the campaign described as a ‘landslide’, while four California cities used it last night for their mayoral and city council elections.]
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Stepping forward to 2021, single-winner preferential voting [Alternative Voting] is garnering more bipartisan support across the US, as evidenced in Georgia. Senior Republican officials have joined Georgia Democrats in proposing it for military and overseas voters to streamline the arduous mailing process for run-off voting, by cutting down the number of forms that voters need to mail to election officials.
The growing bipartisan sponsorship of this bill shows what happens when an electoral system is judged on its merits rather than becoming a politicized proxy for other issues. Oregon is also making considerable strides in updating its election process, with a wide range of lawmakers seeking to expand usage of preferential voting after its resounding success and popularity with voters in Benton County. These efforts can be seen in House Bills 2678 and 2686, which aim to reform state and local elections by using preferential voting to elect state officials. With over a dozen sponsors for these two bills, Oregon seems poised to modernize its election systems and become the next leader in electoral reform within the country [and within North America].
The impressive pace at which legislation championing electoral reform has come along in the first month of 2021 indicates that [Alternative Voting] is an important issue for US voters.
With an impressive amount of state legislatures working to modernize their election systems, 2021 promises to be an exciting year for election reform in the U.S., with states working to make sure their elections truly give voters a voice.
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U.S. is also considering switching to STV instead of AV.
See my blog "Fair Representation Bill if passed would bring STV to U.S. federal elections"
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Canada, the U.S. and U.K. are the last in the developed world to still use First Past The Post. It seems Canada is going to be left behind as both the UK and the US start to make democratic advances.
Canada was once a leader in the democratic advance. But now it seems to be falling behind.
It, not the U.S., was the only place in North America where STV was used to elect provincial-level politicians.
The UK in its control of North Ireland, did use STV for its elections around 1920 and is now returning (or has already returned) to STV for elections in Ireland and Scotland.
The U.S. has switched to AV in Maine. AV does not produce proportional representation. But many historically viewed Alternative Voting as a gateway to PR-STV.
One district in Canada (St. Boniface) did switch from AV to STV just prior to the 1949 provincial election. Provincial-level STV was used in three other Canadian cities at that time.
Two of them (each a full city) - Edmonton and Calgary - had made the switch from multi-member FPTP (Block Voting) to STV.
The other city (Winnipeg) had been using the unusual combination of multi-member wards and FPTP to fill each seat separately before making the switch to provincial PR-STV at-large (city-wide) in 1920, then later switching to STV in multi-member districts dividing the city. (Unfortunately provincial-level STV in all three cities was abolished in the 1950s.)
So Canadian history shows you do not need to to go to AV before making the switch to STV, and it shows that even with AV a switch to STV is not inevitable.
Canada can push ahead with electoral reform at the federal level, moving directly from our present FPTP to STV or to MMP (perhaps a system of MMP that would use STV for district elections) -- and show up the U.S. reformers!
Thanks for reading.
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