PR Library: Types of Voting Systems
Please note that this content was published several years ago and some of the information may not be updated. For up-to-date information on election reform, see our pages on ranked choice voting and proportional representation.
This piece is part of the Proportional Representation Library.
There is a wide range of possible voting systems in the world today, some of which are currently in use, while others are strictly theoretical. These various systems can be broken down into three “families”: plurality semi-proportional and proportional systems. The voting systems within a particular “family” tend to produce similar outcomes and tend to resemble each other in terms of their advantages and disadvantages. The main differences are therefore between the families, not within them. The links below will take you to descriptions of these three “families” of voting systems, including sample ballots. For more detailed information on these systems and their political consequences, see Behind the Ballot Box: A Citizen’s Guide to Voting Systems.
Plurality/majority systems. These are the winner-take-all systems that are widely used in the United States. They include the common plurality systems like single-winner and at-large districts, and less common majority systems like the two-round runoff or “jungle primary.”
Proportional representation systems. These voting systems are used by most other advanced Western democracies and are designed to ensure that parties are represented proportionally (according to the share of the vote they win) in the legislature. They include party list systems, mixed-member proportional, and the single transferable vote.
Semi-proportional systems. These systems are used in some local elections in the United States. They tend to produce more proportional results than plurality/majority systems, but less proportional results than fully proportional systems. They include cumulative voting and limited voting.
Plurality/majority systems
This plurality/majority family of voting systems is undoubtedly the one most familiar to Americans. They are the winner-take-all systems we most often use to elect officials to our local, state, and federal legislatures. These systems all require the winning candidate to garner either a plurality or a majority of the votes. We inherited this approach to voting from the British, and plurality-majority systems are used today primarily in Great Britain and its former colonies, including the United States, Canada, Australia, and India. The main purpose of these systems is to represent the majority or plurality of voters in a district, and (with the exception of at-large voting) to ensure representation of local geographical areas.
Four types of plurality-majority voting systems are described below. The first two are the commonly-used plurality systems: single-member district and at-large voting. Less common are the two majority systems that use runoffs: the two-round system, and instant runoff voting.
Single-Member District Plurality Voting
Single-member district plurality voting (SMDP) is the system most commonly used for legislative elections in the United States. It is the one most people think of when they think of the word “voting.” In Great Britain and Canada, this system is often called “first-past-the-post.”
How It Works. In this system, all the candidates appear on the ballot and the voters indicate their choice of one of them–by marking an X, pulling a voting lever, etc. (See example below.) All the votes are then counted and the winner is the one with the most votes. Winners need not collect a majority of the votes, only more votes than their opponents do–a plurality of the votes. So if candidate A receives 40% of the vote, candidate B receives 35%, and candidate C gets 25% — candidate A wins the seat.
Single-Member District Plurality Ballot
Political Attributes. SMDP is good at ensuring that the plurality of voters are represented and that all local geographical areas have a voice in the legislature. It also tends to reinforce the two-party system, and to produce stable single-party majorities in legislatures. It does this by making it difficult for third parties to elect their candidates. This also serves as a check on small extremist parties. On the other hand, this voting system also tends to misrepresent parties, produce manufactured majorities, encourage gerrymandering, discourage voter turnout, create high levels of wasted votes, and deny fair representation to third parties, racial minorities and women.
At-Large Voting
This system is unique among plurality-majority systems in that it uses multi-member districts instead of single-member districts. For that reason political scientists often refer to it as “multi-member district plurality” voting. Internationally it is often called “block voting.” Many representatives to state legislatures and even the U. S. Congress were at one time elected in multi-member districts–often small two or three seat districts. Ten states still use some of these districts for state legislative elections. Today, however, at-large voting is used primarily in local elections, primarily municipal elections. Typically an entire town or city is considered to be one large district, and all candidates for office run together against each other.
How It Works. In at-large voting, all the candidates for office run in one large multi-member district — usually the entire city. Voters have the same number of votes as the number of seats to be filled. The candidates with the highest numbers of votes (a plurality) win. Below is a ballot that would be used in a city election in which the members of a five-person city council would be chosen. All candidates for the five seats are on the ballot and voters cast five votes for the candidates they prefer. The following table illustrates how the votes might be distributed and the winners chosen.
At-Large Ballot
At-Large Voting Results
There are several variations of at-large voting. In one of them that is used in Seattle and several other cities, the at-large seats are numbered and specific candidates vie for these individual seats. So candidates A and B would vie for seat one, candidates C and D for seat two, and so on. All the voters in the city cast one vote for their preferred candidates in each of these races, and the candidate with the plurality wins. In another variation, some cities use the numbered seats, but also have a residency requirement. Candidates for a particular seat must live in a certain area or district of the city. This ensures that all neighborhoods have some representation. Again all the voters in the city are able to vote for each of the seats.
Political Attributes. At-large voting gives good representation to the largest political group or party. It is also designed to ensure that city councilors represented the interests of the city as a whole, not the special interests of particular neighborhood districts. Like SMDP, it also encourages a two-party system and single-party legislative majorities. In addition, since there are no districts, this voting systems eliminates the possibility of gerrymandering. However, because this is a winner-take-all system, at-large voting shares most of the same problems as single-member district plurality voting, including the misrepresentation of parties, manufactured majorities, low voter turnout, high levels of wasted votes, and denial of fair representation to third parties, racial minorities and women. And it may make some of these problems worse. In particular, this system tends to be the worst at representing racial and political minorities. It allows a majority of the voters to win all the seats on the city council, thus shutting out these minorities from representation. (Note that in the election described above, the Republican voters are in the majority and so are able to elect all the city councilors.) Finally, at-large voting, in its most common form, fails to ensure that all neighborhoods in the city are represented.
Two-Round Runoff Voting
The two-round system (TRS) is a majority voting system. Majority systems are currently used less commonly than plurality systems. They require candidates in single-member district elections to garner a majority of the votes to win legislative office. TRS requires a runoff election between the two top candidates if no candidate wins a majority of the votes in the general election. This system is designed to solve one of the obvious problems of plurality voting: the possibility of electing a candidate that was supported only by a minority of the electorate in the district.
TRS is used rarely worldwide. Only two countries in Western Europe use TRS for legislative elections, France and Monaco. Several developing countries that came under French influence also use this system, including Mali, Togo, Chad, Gabon, and Haiti. In the United States, TRS is used in a number of jurisdictions, mostly on the local level and mostly in the South. Runoffs first came into use here at the beginning of the twentieth century when parties began to have primaries. These primaries often attracted more than two candidates and the resulting winner would sometimes garner much less than a majority of the vote. Today, runoffs are also used in some U.S. cities that have non-partisan elections, again primarily because such contests are more likely to draw more than two candidates.
How It Works. In order to ensure that the winning candidate receives a majority of the vote, this system uses two rounds of voting with polling taking place on two separate days. Ballots are identical to those used in plurality voting (see above), and voters mark them in the same way. In the first round, all candidates are listed on the ballot and voters indicate their preference of one of them. All these votes are then added up and if a candidate receives a majority of the vote (50% + 1 vote), that candidate is declared elected. If no one receives a majority, the field is cut down to the top two candidates who received the highest number of votes, and a runoff election is held. The second election is typically held several weeks after the first. The winner is the candidate who gets the most votes, which is inevitably a majority, since there are only two candidates running.
Political Attributes. The two-round runoff system is only a slight modification of the single-member district plurality system, and it is really only designed to address one of its problems — the possibility of a plurality winner — which it does eliminate. It also does well in encouraging a two-party system and single-party legislative majorities. However, it is still a winner-take-all voting system and so it shares all the basic problems of this approach to voting, including the misrepresentation of parties, manufactured majorities, gerrymandering, high levels of wasted votes, and denial of fair representation to third parties, racial minorities and women. In addition, it brings with it two more problems: the added expense of a second election, and the lower voter turnout that usually plagues those second elections.
Instant Runoff Voting
Instant runoff voting is also known as “IRV,” and “majority preferential voting.” In Australia, where this system is used to elect their lower house of parliament, it is called the “alternative vote.” Like two-round voting, this majority system a minor variation of single-member district plurality voting that was developed to ensure that the winning candidate enjoys the support of the majority of the voters in the district. It was also thought to be an improvement over the two-round system because it does not require a separate election–it provides an “instant” runoff.
How It Works. In IRV voting, like plurality voting, all candidates are listed on the ballot. But instead of voting for only one candidate, voters rank the candidates in the order of their preference. This ranking process is illustrated in ballot below. It is an AccuVote ballot, which allows ballots to be scanned and tabulated by computer. It is similar to marking answers on the standardized tests used in schools. On this ballot, voters fill in numbered boxes to indicate their ranking of the candidates. The mark a “1” for their most preferred candidate, a “2” for their second preference, and so on.
Instant Runoff Ballot
The counting of the ballots is also different from plurality voting. First, all the number one preferences of the voters are counted. If a candidate receives over 50% of the first choice votes, he or she is declared elected. If no candidate receives a majority, then the candidate with the fewest votes is eliminated. The ballots of supporters of this defeated candidate are then transferred to whichever of the remaining candidates they marked as their number two choice. (It is as if you told the supporters of the last place candidate, “Your candidate cannot possibly win, so which of the remaining candidates would you like your vote to go to?) After this transfer, the votes are then recounted to see if any candidate now receives a majority of the vote. The process of eliminating the lowest candidate and transferring their votes continues until one candidate receives a majority of the continuing votes and wins the election.
This transfer process is illustrated in the table below. In this hypothetical election, there are 100,000 votes cast and no candidate receives over 50% of the vote in the first round. So the lowest candidate–Royce–is eliminated and his ballots are transferred to their second choices. 1,000 of Royce’s supporters gave Chou as their second choice, and 6,000 indicated Kleinberg as their second choice. The new totals show that no one yet has a majority, so Chou is eliminated. 4,000 of Chou’s votes are transferred to Kleinberg and 5,000 are given to Rosen. (If some of Chou’s ballots had listed Royce as the second choice, they would have been transferred to their third choice, since Royce had been eliminated.) After this latest transfer is it clear that Kleinberg now has over 50% of the vote and she is declared the winner. As this example illustrates, this system essentially operates as a series of runoff elections, with progressively fewer candidates each time, until one candidate gets a majority of the vote.
Vote Counting in Instant Runoff Voting
Political Attributes. IRV has the advantage of the two-round system — ensuring a majority winner — while avoiding its major disadvantages: the added expense and lower voter turnout of a second election. However, being in the plurality-majority family of voting systems, IRV remains a winner-take-all voting method and does not, on its own, confer the benefits of proportional representation.
Proportional representation systems. These voting systems are used by most other advanced Western democracies and are designed to ensure that parties are represented proportionally (according to the share of the vote they win) in the legislature. They include party list systems, mixed-member proportional, and the single transferable vote.
Semi-proportional systems. These systems are used in some local elections in the United States. They tend to produce more proportional results than plurality/majority systems, but less proportional results than fully proportional systems. They include cumulative voting and limited voting.
Proportional representation systems
Proportional representation voting (PR) is the main rival to plurality-majority voting. Among advanced western democracies it has become the predominant voting system. For instance, in Western Europe, 21 of 28 countries use proportional representation, including Austria, Belgium, Cyprus, Denmark, Finland, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Luxembourg, Malta, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, and Switzerland.
The basic approach of proportional representation is simple: legislators are elected in multimember districts instead of single-member districts, and the number of seats that a party wins in an election is proportional to the amount of its support among voters. So if you have a 10-member district and the Republicans win 50% of the vote, they receive five of the ten seats. If the Democrats win 30% of the vote, they get three seats; and if a third party gets 20% of the vote, they win two seats. Electoral system designers have devised several ways to achieve these proportional results, and so there are three basic kinds of PR described below: party list, mixed-member, and single-transferable vote (also called choice voting).
These PR systems were devised to solve the many problems caused by plurality-majority voting systems. As a rule, PR voting systems provide more accurate representation of parties, better representation for political and racial minorities, fewer wasted votes, higher levels of voter turnout, better representation of women, greater likelihood of majority rule, and little opportunity for gerrymandering.
Party List Voting
Party list voting systems are by far the most common form of proportional representation. Over 80% of the PR systems used worldwide are some form of party list voting. It remains the system used in most European democracies and in many newly democratized countries, including South Africa.
How It Works. Legislators are elected in large, multi-member districts. Each party puts up a list or slate of candidates equal to the number of seats in the district. Independent candidates may also run, and they are listed separately on the ballot as if they were their own party (see below). On the ballot, voters indicate their preference for a particular party and the parties then receive seats in proportion to their share of the vote. So in a five-member district, if the Democrats win 40% of the vote, they would win two of the five seats. The two winning Democratic candidates would be chosen according to their position on the list.
There are two broad types of list systems: closed list and open list. In a closed list system–the original form of party list voting–the party fixes the order in which the candidates are listed and elected, and the voter simply casts a vote for the party as a whole. This is shown in the first ballot below, which illustrates an election for the House of Representatives in a five-seat district. Voters are not able to indicate their preference for any candidates on the list, but must accept the list in the order presented by the party. Winning candidates are selected in the exact order they appear on the original list. So in the example here, if the Democrats won two seats, the first two candidates on the pre-ordered list–Foster and Rosen-Amy–would be elected.
Closed Party List Ballot
Most European democracies now use the open list form of party list voting. This approach allows voters to express a preference for particular candidates, not just parties. It is designed to give voters some say over the order of the list and thus which candidates get elected. One version of this is illustrated in the ballot below. Voters are presented with unordered or random lists of candidates chosen in party primaries. Voters cannot vote for a party directly, but must cast a vote for an individual candidate. This vote counts for the specific candidate as well as for the party. So the order of the final list completely depends on the number of votes won by each candidate on the list. The most popular candidates rise to the top of the list and have a better chance of being elected. In our example, if the Democrats won 2 seats, and Volz and Gentzler received the highest and next highest number of individual votes, they would rise to the top of the list and be elected. This example is similar to the system used in Finland and widely considered to be the most open version of list voting.
Open Party List Ballot
A variety of different formulas exist for accomplishing the actual allocation of seats to the parties. One of the simplest seat allocation formulas is the called the “largest remainder formula.” In this approach, the first step is to calculate a quota, which is determined by taking the total number of valid votes in the district and dividing this by the number of seats. In the example in the table below, 100,000 votes were cast and ten seats are to be filled. 100,000/10 = 10,000 – which is the quota. The quota is then divided into the vote that each party receives and the party wins one seat for each whole number produced. So the Republican party received 38,000 votes, which is divided by 10,000 to produce three seats – with a remainder of 8,000. After this first allocation of seats is complete than the remainder numbers for the parties are compared and the parties with the largest remainders are allocated the remaining seats. In our example, two seats remain to be allocated and the Republicans and Moll, the independent candidate, have the largest remainders, so they get the seats. Ultimately all the parties end up with the number of seats that as closely as possible approximates their percentage of the vote.
Largest Remainder Approach to Seat Allocation
Political Attributes. Party list voting has a number of advantages over plurality-majority voting. It assures accurate representation of parties in legislatures. It gives voters more choices of parties at the polls, increases voter turnout, and wastes far fewer votes. This form of PR also reduces the creation of manufactured majorities and the opportunity for gerrymandering. In addition, it assures fair representation for third parties, racial minorities, and women. On the other hand, some forms of party list PR use very large districts and do not ensure local geographical representation. Closed party list systems give voters little power over which party candidates win office. Like all PR systems, party list PR usually results in coalitions governments, not single-party governments.
Mixed-Member Proportional Voting
Mixed-member proportional representation goes by a variety of other names, including “the additional member system,” “compensatory PR,” the “two vote system,” and “the German system.” It is an attempt to combine a single-member district system with a proportional voting system. Half of the members of the legislature are elected in single-member district plurality contests. The other half are elected by a party list vote and added on to the district members so that each party has its appropriate share of seats in the legislature. Proponents claim that mixed-member proportional voting (MMP) is the best of both worlds: providing the geographical representation and close constituency ties of single-member plurality voting along with the fairness and diversity of representation that comes with PR voting.
This system was originally invented in West Germany right after World War Two, though since then it has also been adopted in several other countries, including Bolivia and Venezuela. It is still one of the least used PR systems, but in recent years it has begun to garner a great deal of attention. In fact, it is now one of the “hottest” systems being considered by those involved in electoral design. In part this growing attention is a result of MMP’s unique claim to be a “compromise” between the two main rival systems. In the 1990s New Zealand abandoned its traditional single-member plurality system for MMP. Hungary also adopted this approach. Most recently, the newly formed parliaments of Scotland and Wales used this system for their first elections.
How It Works. People cast votes on a double ballot–see the ballot below. First, on the left part of the ballot, they vote for a district representative. This part of the ballot is a single-member district plurality contest to see which person will represent the district in the legislature. The person with the most votes wins. Typically half of the seats in the legislature are filled in this way. So in a hypothetical 100-member state legislature, the winners of these district contests would occupy 50 of the seats.
Mixed-Member Proportional Representation Ballot
On the right part of the ballot–the party list portion–voters indicate their choice among the parties, and the other half of the seats in the legislature are filled from regional lists of candidates chosen by these parties. The party lists are closed in the German version. These party list votes are counted on a national basis to determine the total portion of the 100-seat legislature that each party deserves. Candidates from each party’s lists are then added to its district winners until that party achieves its appropriate share of seats. The following table illustrates how this process works for our hypothetical election. The Democrats won 40% of the party list votes in the 100-member state legislature, so they would be entitled to a total of 40 of the 100 seats. Since they already elected 28 of their candidates in district elections, they would then add 12 more from their regional party lists to come up to their quota of 40 seats.
Allocation of Seats in MMP
In the German version two electoral thresholds are used, either of which a party must overcome to be allotted seats in the legislature. A party must either get 5% of the nationwide party list vote or win at least three district races in order for it to gain any seats in the legislature. In our hypothetical case, the New Party did not win any district seats, but they did win over 5% of the nationwide vote, so they deserve their share of legislative seats–which in this case would be six seats, all of which would be filled from the regional party lists.
One variation of the mixed-member system is called “parallel voting.” It uses the same double ballot, but it differs in that the party list seats are simply divided proportionately among the parties then added to the district winners, with not attempt to ensure proportional representation for parties in the legislature. For this reason, this voting system is usually classified as a semiproportional system.
Political Attributes. MMP has a number of advantages over plurality-majority voting. It produces more accurate representation of parties in legislatures, while also ensuring that each local district has a representative. It gives voters more choices of parties at the polls, increases voter turnout, and wastes far fewer votes. This form of PR also reduces the creation of manufactured majorities. In addition, it assures fair representation for third parties, racial minorities, and women. On the other hand, gerrymandering is possible in the single-member districts used by this system. Also, MMP creates two different types of representatives, those who represent districts and those who represent parties. Finally, like all PR systems, MMP usually results in coalitions governments, not single-party governments.
Single Transferable Vote Or Choice Voting
This system of proportional representation is known by several names. Political scientists call it “the single transferable vote.” It is called the “Hare-Clark system” in Australia. In the United States, electoral reform activists have taken to calling it “choice voting.” Currently this system is used to elect parliaments in Ireland and Malta. In Australia it is used to elect the federal Senate, as well as the legislatures in several states there. It is also the PR system that was used in a number of cities in the United States during the twentieth century, including New York, Cincinnati, Cleveland, Toledo, and Boulder. It continues to be used today in Cambridge, Massachusetts for elections to their city council and school board. (For a history of this system in this country, see A Brief History of Proportional Representation in the U.S.)
How It Works. The voting process is illustrated by ballot below. All candidates are listed in the same place on the ballot. Instead of voting for one person, voters rank each candidate in their order of choice. So if you like Campbell best, you would mark the “1” after his name. If you liked Gomez second best, you would mark “2” by his name, and so on. You can rank as few or as many as you want. This ballot illustrates the use of the AccuVote system used in Cambridge, Massachusetts to elect its city council and school board. Voters fill in the ranking numbers as they would for standardized tests taken in school, which allows for computerized vote counting and ballot transfers.
Choice Voting Ballot
As the name “single transferable vote” implies, this systems involves a process of transferring votes. To understand how the transfer process works, it may be best to start out with a simple analogy. Imagine a school where a class is trying to elect a committee. Any student who wishes to run stands at the front of the class and the other students vote for their favorite candidates by standing beside them. Students standing almost alone next to their candidate will soon discover that this person has no chance of being elected and move to another candidate of their choice to help him or her get elected. Some of the students standing next to a very popular candidate may realize that this person has more than enough support to win, and decide to go stand next to another student that they would also like to see on the committee. In the end, after all of this shuffling around, most students would be standing next to candidates that will be elected, which is the ultimate point of this process.
In the single transferable vote, votes are transferred around just as the students moved from candidate to candidate in the analogy. The exact order of the transfer process is illustrated in figure below. An example of how the votes are actually transferred is shown in the table that follows. For the sake of simplicity, assume that there is a three-seat district in which six people are running for office. The first step in the process is to establish the threshold: the minimum number of votes necessary to win a seat. The threshold usually consists of the total number of valid votes divided by one plus the number of seats to be filled, plus one vote. The formula looks like this: Threshold = (valid votes/1+seats) +1 vote. So in our three-seat districts with 10,000 voters, a candidate would need 10,000/1+3 (which is 2,500) plus one more vote, for 2,501.
Diagram of Ballot Transfer Process
The second step is to count all the number one choices to see if any candidates have reached the threshold of 2,501. As shown on the table below, the Democrat Gomez has 2,900 voters and he is declared elected. But Gomez actually has 399 more votes than he needs to win. These votes are considered wasted if they stay with Gomez, so they are transferred to the second choices on the ballot. (There are several ways to do this, but we needn’t get into those details here.) In the second count, we see the effect of this transfer. The other Democratic candidate, Campbell, gets 300 of those second choice votes, and the independent candidate, Daniels, gets the other 99. The vote totals are now recalculated to see if anyone is now over the threshold. No one is, so the next transfer takes place. The candidate with the least chance to win is eliminated and his or her votes are transferred to their second choices. This candidate is Higgins, the Republican, and 500 of his votes are transferred to the other Republican candidate, Dains; and the other 100 votes are given to Daniels. Again the votes are recounted to see if anyone has reached the threshold. Dains has reached it with 2,800 votes and so she is declared elected. Once again her excess votes are redistributed to their second choices–200 to Graybeal, and 99 to Daniels. But still no one has reached the threshold, so again the lowest candidate is eliminated and those votes transferred. That candidate is Campbell, the Democrat, and 100 of his votes go to Graybeal, and 600 go to Daniels. This puts Daniels, the independent candidate, over the threshold with 2,698 votes, and she is the last one elected.
Ballot Count and Transfer Process
This transfer process is a bit complicated, so why does it exist? The transfer process was invented primarily to reduce the problem of wasted votes — votes that are cast but do not actually elect anyone. Plurality-majority systems routinely waste large numbers of votes and this is why they are prone to such problems as party misrepresentation, and the underrepresentation of political minorities, racial minorities, and women. The transfer process in STV is designed to ensure that the fewest votes are wasted and that the maximum number of people gets to elect a representative to office. It acknowledges that there are two kinds of wasted votes: votes for candidates that stand little chance of winning, and votes in excess of what a winning candidate needs. Transferring these votes to their next ranked choice makes it more likely that they will actually contribute to the election of a candidate.
Political Attributes. Choice voting has a number of advantages over plurality-majority voting. It produces more accurate representation of parties in legislatures. It gives voters more choices of parties at the polls, increases voter turnout, and wastes far fewer votes. This form of PR also reduces the creation of manufactured majorities. In addition, it assures fair representation for third parties, racial minorities, and women. All votes are for individual candidates not parties, and this arrangement allows voters to cross party lines with their votes. It is also the only form of PR that can be used in nonpartisan elections. On the other hand, if the districts are too small, some gerrymandering is possible. STV also produces somewhat less proportional results than other forms of PR. Finally, like all PR systems, STV usually results in coalition governments, not single-party governments.
Semiproportional voting systems
As the term “semi-proportional” implies, these voting systems occupy a space somewhere between plurality-majority systems and proportional representation systems. They were originally invented to try to solve some of the problems of plurality-majority voting, particularly the misrepresentation of parties and the lack of representation for political and ethnic minorities. In general, these voting systems tend to produce somewhat fairer representation that plurality-majority systems, but less fair representation than fully proportional systems like mixed-member PR and choice voting.
Two kinds of semiproportional systems are described below: limited voting and cumulative voting. Both of these are variations of the at-large voting system described in the section on plurality-majority voting. Like at-large voting, these two systems use multi-member districts and voters have multiple votes. But some modifications are made that dampen the winner-take-all characteristics of at-large voting and that usually result in a more proportional allocation of seats among parties.
Because semiproportional systems are often considered inferior to fully proportional systems, they find little use worldwide. No country uses the cumulative vote to elect their national legislature, and the limited vote is only used in Spain to elects its senate. However, these two systems have been used occasionally on the local level in this country. In the 1980s and 90s, there was a resurgence of interest in the cumulative vote, primarily among those interested in finding new ways to ensure fair representation for racial and ethnic minorities. Several towns and counties have now adopted cumulative voting in a response to these voting rights concerns.
The Cumulative Vote
In the United States, cumulative voting (CV) is the most talked about form of semiproportional voting. This is largely because voting rights advocates have expressed a growing interest in this form of voting. And in response to voting rights suits, several local areas have abandoned plurality-majority systems and adopted cumulative voting. CV is now used in several cities and counties in Alabama to elect their legislative bodies. It is also used in Amarillo and several other cities and towns in Texas to elect either their local school boards or city councils.
Interestingly, the most common use of cumulative voting in the United States is not in the public sector, but in the private sector. It is used for the election of boards of directors in hundreds of corporations. In fact, six state constitutions mandate this form of voting for corporate boards, and many other states allow its use for this purpose. The aim is to allow minority stockholders to elect some representatives to these governing bodies.
How It Works. The cumulative vote is really just a variation of at-large voting. Candidates run in multi-member districts. Voters have as many votes as there are seats. Voters cast their votes for individual candidates and the winners are the ones with the most votes. The major difference is that voters may “cumulate” or combine their votes on one or more candidates instead of having to cast one vote for each candidate. In other words, voters may distribute their votes among the candidates in any way they prefer. For example, in elections for the county commission in Chilton County, Alabama, voters have seven votes to use to elect the seven commissioners. Voters can cast all seven for one candidate, one vote for each of seven candidates, four for one and three for another, or any other combination they desire.
As illustrated in the ballot below, the ballot for the cumulative vote resembles somewhat the one used for at-large voting. However, it has spaces for voters to cast multiple votes for each candidate. This example shows a computer readable ballot for the election of three officeholders to a city council. Voters fill in a square for each vote that they want to give to a candidate–up to a total of three for all the candidates. Computing the results in cumulative voting is straightforward: the candidates with the most votes win.
Cumulative Vote Ballot
Political attributes. Cumulative voting tends to yield more proportional representation of parties than plurality-majority systems. Political and racial minorities also have a better chance of fair representation under this system. On the other hand, cumulative voting is usually less proportional than fully proportional systems like choice voting and mixed-member PR. And at times, political and racial minorities may be denied representation entirely — especially if these groups nominate too many candidates. The main problem is that this system is inconsistent in its results: sometimes producing proportional results and wasting few votes, and other times producing grossly disproportional results and wasting many votes. Proponents of PR believe that their system is a more reliable way to maximize effective votes and produce fair representation for all political groups.
The Limited Vote
The limited vote (LV) is another variation of at-large voting. Worldwide it is rarely used, with only Spain employing it to elect its Senate. In the United States, several cities and towns, mostly in Connecticut and Pennsylvania have used the limited vote for many years–again primarily to ensure some representation for political minorities. More recently, 21 towns in Alabama adopted limited voting to settle voting rights suits.
How It Works. The limited vote works almost exactly the same way as at-large voting. Candidates run in a multi-member district. People have multiple votes and vote for individual candidates. The winners are the candidates with the most votes. The crucial difference is that voters have fewer votes than the number of seats to be elected. The number of votes can vary, the only rule being that they must be fewer than the seats. For example, in a seven-seat district, voters might have five votes, or three, or even one, though the most usual arrangement is for voters to have one or two fewer votes than seats.
The limited vote ballot is virtually identical to those used in at-large voting, as illustrated in the example below. In this example, voters are electing three members of the legislature and they are given two votes. Counting the ballots and determining the winner is very straightforward: the winners are the candidates with the most votes.
Limited Vote Ballot
Political attributes. Limited voting has the same general advantages and disadvantages of cumulative voting. It tends to yield more proportional representation of parties than plurality-majority systems. Political and racial minorities also have a better chance of fair representation under this system. On the other hand, limited voting is usually less proportional than fully proportional systems like choice voting and mixed-member PR. And at times, political and racial minorities may be denied representation entirely — especially if these groups nominate too many candidates. The main problem is that this system is inconsistent in its results: sometimes producing proportional results and wasting few votes, and other times producing grossly disproportional results and wasting many votes. Proponents of PR believe that their system is a more reliable way to maximize effective votes.