Choice Voting Blog

The next Davis Governance Task Force meeting is Monday, Jan. 31 at 7PM in the small meeting room at the Davis Community Chambers (5th and B Streets). The current agenda is posted at the task force web site.

The meeting will include brief discussion of ways to select the mayor in conjunction with choice voting for council member elections.

A Davis Citizens for Representation quarter sheet is now available for distributing. Feel free to hand them out.

There is a good letter to the editor in today's California Aggie that proposes using the countback process to fill ASUCD Senate vacancies. An editorial in the same issue underscores the need for a method that is more democratic than having the President pick all the replacements.

Five fellows or directors of the New America Foundation will speak this Thursday from 12-1:30 in Sacramento. The participants include Steven Hill and David Lesher, who wrote a recent op-ed piece advocating proportional representation to elect the California state legislature.

Called "The Real State of the State: Provocative Ideas and Proposals for the Future of California,” the event will also include discussion of job creation, education, health care costs, a budgetary crisis, political leadership, immigration and regional inequities.

Lunch will also be served. RSVP with Lily Ho at ho@newamerica.net or (916) 448-5189. The event is located at the Library and Courts 2 Building, 900 N St., Room 340. Hosted by the California Research Bureau.

The San Francisco Chronicle reports that Governor Schwarzenegger's redistricting proposal is now public. Assembly Members McCarthy and Runner introduced Assembly Constitutional Amendment No. 3 (ACAX1 3) on Friday.

Under the amendment, a randomly selected multi-partisan panel of 3 judges would choose new district boundaries. Among other things, the amendment provides that (1) districts be compact, (2) effect on political parties and incumbents not be considered, (3) competitiveness be ensured (percentage of registered voters in two major parties differ by no more than 7 percent), and (4) at least 6 public hearings must be hold before deciding.

Current districts are not necessarily compact. For instance, the State Legislature included Davis in a Congressional district (CD1) that lies along the coast and stretches to the Oregon border. See the picture. The red dot is Davis.

So far, amendment support is split along party lines, with 18 Republican coauthors and no Democrats. On the whole, Democratic politicians benefit from existing district lines. For example, in last November's Assembly elections, 53% of Assembly votes were cast for Democrats, yet 60% of the Assembly is Democrat. For Republicans, 44% of votes cast translated to 40% Republican Assembly seats. Of the 153 state and federal legislative seats up for grabs in California last November, none changed parties.

Two ASUCD Senators resigned Thursday night. According to the ASUCD Constitution, the ASUCD President gets to appoint two replacement Senators. The Senators have full voting privileges and serve until the next ASUCD general election. In next month's election, voters will elect eight senators instead of the usual six. Over the past year, the ASUCD President will have single-handedly picked four out of twelve senators.

Is there a more democratic way to fill vacancies? In California state and federal elections, they hold special elections to fill vacancies. But for choice voting elections, there is a democratic process called the "countback" that requires no additional election. For example, the choice voting city of Cambridge, MA uses the countback to fill vacancies.

The idea behind the countback process is to see who the now-unrepresented voters would have preferred next. Take the exhausted ballots and the ballots that went to elect the resigning candidates. Using those, conduct another choice voting election. By design, countback elections would ensure that the ASUCD Senate continues to represent an accurate cross-section of the voters -- even after several resignations. We illustrate the countback process for three recent vacancies to show what would have happened if it were already in place.

Malik and Ruel resignations

Senators Nafeh Malik and Sean Ruel resigned in January 2005. They were elected in the Fall 2004 election as Student Focus candidates. To find their replacements under countback, conduct a 2-winner choice voting election using the 513 ballots that went to elect each of them in last November's election, along with the election's 485 exhausted ballots:

• round-by-round countback tally to fill Malik and Ruel vacancies*

The final round shows their replacements to be Parisa Manteghi and Christina Chin, also Student Focus candidates. As expected, the countback preserves the original cross-section of voter opinion.

Ackerman resignation

Senator James Ackerman resigned in the spring of 2004. He was elected in the Fall 2003 election as a Student Focus candidate. To find his replacement, conduct a 1-winner choice voting election using the 350 ballots that went to elect him in the Fall 2003 election, along with the election's 327 exhausted ballots:

• round-by-round countback example to fill Ackerman vacancy*

The final round shows his replacement to be Leticia Miller, also a Student Focus candidate. As expected, the countback preserves the original cross-section of voter opinion.

Barr resignation

Senator Adam Barr resigned in November 2004. He was originally elected in the Winter 2004 election under the LEAD slate. To find his replacement, take the 582 ballots that went to elect Adam Barr and the 576 ballots that ended up in the exhausted pile. Then conduct a 1-winner choice voting election with those ballots.

• round-by-round countback tally to fill Barr vacancy

The majority of these voters preferred Jenn de la Vega, a fellow LEAD slate member. So Jenn de la Vega would have won the countback to repace Adam Barr. In contrast, ASUCD President Kalen Gallagher chose Student Focus candidate Cari Ham to replace Barr. Ham was the first-eliminated candidate in the countback above.

This countback was tallied using pSTV, an open-source vote-counting program.

What's Next

There is a movement in ASUCD to adopt a Constitutional amendment to implement the countback process. DCR activists are helping with this change.

*Thanks to Steve Willett of Voting Solutions, LLC for conducting these countback tallies for DCR.

On Monday, January 17th (Martin Luther King Day), the Linux Users Group of Davis (LUGOD) will be sponsoring a talk by Scott Ritchie of the Open Vote Foundation. The foundation's goal is to develop open source software for use on touchscreen voting machines that would provide a voter-verifiable receipt.

LUGOD will be sponsoring this talk as part of their regular meeting. These bi-monthly meetings are open to the public and they encourage anyone to come. The meeting will take place in Kemper Hall, Room 1131 on the UC Davis campus from 6:30-9PM.

To get more info about this meeting, including directions to its UC Davis location, go to http://www.lugod.org/meeting/.

The Sacramento Bee reported today that the special election to replace the late US Rep. Robert Matsui will be held March 8. Moreover, if no candidate receives a majority of the vote, a second runoff election will be held May 3.

According to Sacramento County's Registrar, each election will cost between $1 million and $1.2 million. Neither of these elections is consolidated, so low voter turnout is likely. Matsui's Congressional district lies entirely within the county of Sacramento and has over 300,000 voters.

Instant runoff voting (IRV) would get the job done in one election, saving over a million taxpayer dollars every time there is a special election. IRV would save time and money for the voters, candidates, and election administrators.

Following news of both the special election and Schwarzenegger's redistricting proposal, the editorial board of the Sacramento Bee affirmed one of the points underlying Hill and Lesher's Sunday op-ed piece. In an editorial published today about who will run to replace Matsui, they write:

"At the same time, there is a growing groundswell in California against the tendency of both parties to map safe seats and then pick the winners....

"Democracy is best served when voters can choose from a range of candidates, and when front-runners are challenged, in the spirit of competition, to lay out their views and their vision of a better world."

Steven Hill and David Lesher of the New America Foundation wrote a great op-ed in Sunday's Sacramento Bee about statewide electoral reform. Using Schwarzenegger's redistricting proposal as a point of departure, they discuss the benefits of holding a Citizen's Assembly in California to study proposals like statewide choice voting with multi-member districts. Hill is also with FairVote: The Center for Voting and Democracy.

For the second time in one day, the New York Times has covered proportional representation! This time it's for movies. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences uses multi-winner choice voting to select the 5 finalists in each of its Oscar categories. Today's New York Times article describes the process. This is the same choice voting system that UC Davis adopted and that the Davis Governance Task Force is studying for Davis City Council elections.

Ironically, the Academy uses plurality voting (the most votes) to choose the winner among the finalists. This allows for surprising results -- results that might not reflect the majority of the Academy's approximately 6000 voting members.

The New York Times has a nice graphic illustrating proportional representation in today's online and tomorrow's print edition. On January 30, Iraq will use PR to elect 275 legislators. Voters vote for a party, and each party wins a fraction of seats equal to its percentage of the vote. So a candidate or party needs only .4% of the vote to win representation.

The election is also structured to guarantee that at least 25% of the representatives will be women. In the United States in 2004, women made up only 14% of the House and 14% of the Senate. See Rutgers's Center for American Women and Politics for more statistics.

In his "State of the State" address today, Governor Schwarzenegger called for redrawing district boundaries in a nonpartisan way. See for example this San Francisco Chronicle article from last week. His proposal is good, but there are deeper solutions worth supporting.

For instance, British Columbia's Citizens' Assembly on Electoral Reform recommended a proportional system for their provincial government. They currently use single-member districts just like California. Last October, after 11 months of study and public input, they recommended electing their representatives from large multi-member districts using choice voting. This both (1) increases citizen representation and (2) makes district lines moot. Their decision was nearly unanimous: 146-7.

In 2004, Wangari Maathai became the first African woman to receive the Nobel Prize for Peace. On December 10, she delivered her Nobel lecture. She paints a picture fundamentally connecting better forms of governance to a sustainable and equitable society. Her words call on people everywhere "to expand democratic space and build fair and just societies that allow the creativity and energy of their citizens to flourish."