Californians for Electoral Reform

At-Large Elections Challenged in Fremont and Santa Clara

2017-04-15T11:37:00.003-07:00

Attention CfER members: Fremont and Santa Clara are considering changes to their election systems. If you live in either city, or know somebody who does, CfER needs supporters of electoral reform to contact the city council members of those cities!

Fremont and Santa Clara have been notified that their cities can be shown to lack minority representation on their respective city councils despite having significant minority populations, and thus their "at-large" elections must be changed.

The default reaction for cities in this position is to switch to district elections. We need to show these city councils that there is support for better approaches and ask that they consider proportional representation or other methods instead of districts!

If you live in the City of Santa Clara, or know someone who does, please use or pass along these talking points:

The 2011 Charter Review Committee recommended that the Santa Clara City Council consider adopting proportional representation by 2014; had they done so, there wouldn't be a lawsuit today.
It isn't clear that majority-minority districts can be constructed for both the Asian-American and Latino populations.
The plaintiff seems open to alternative remedies other that district elections.
Urge the City Council to discuss alternatives such as proportional representation (multi-winner ranked choice voting) and cumulative voting when they meet with the plaintiff prior to their Case Management Conference.

Contact information for the Santa Clara City Council can be found here:

http://santaclaraca.gov/government/council/councilmembers

If you live in Fremont, or know someone who does, please use or pass along these talking points:

It would be premature for the City to hastily switch to single-seat districts – because the City has not considered three other voting methods that will allow the City to continue using citywide (at-large) elections to fill all of its elected positions: (1) ranked choice voting, (2) cumulative voting, and (3) limited voting.
In a geographically integrated city, we expect that it will not be possible to draw lines to protect any demographic group. In his CVRA “threat” letter, Kevin Shenkman indirectly admits that a district remedy only works when a protected demographic group is "geographically compact", which is not true in many Bay Area cities. Though he cites a general statement from a federal court case, Mr. Shenkman does not provide evidence that districts would solve the problem in Fremont.
Ranked choice voting (RCV) allows voters to rank their candidates in order of preference (e.g., 1-2-3). After adopting RCV, San Francisco elected the most diverse body of leaders in its history.
Cumulative voting and limited voting have been used to resolve voting rights cases.
A simple city charter could be adopted for a limited purpose (as Emeryville did in 2014 to approve a transfer tax).
We urge city representatives to “discuss a voluntary change” to the city’s election system with Shenkman & Hughes, and promptly refer this important matter to an appropriate committee that will be empowered to make specific recommendations to the Council.

Contact information for the Fremont City Council can be found here:

https://fremont.gov/598/Mayor

You can also send email to districtelections@fremont.gov

Please re-post!

Instant Runoff Voting Could Improve Boston Elections

2015-07-08T23:18:00.002-07:00

Nice piece by James Sutherland about how Instant Runoff Voting would "democratize municipal contests":

http://commonwealthmagazine.org/politics/instant-runoff-voting-could-improve-boston-elections/

Check out the Voice for Democracy, CfER's Newsletter

2015-07-05T08:17:00.001-07:00

Californians for Electoral Reform has been publishing the Voice for Democracy since 1998 and continues to regularly publish them. CfER members receive them as a PDF attachment via email, and the newsletters are uploaded to the CfER website a few months later.

You can find them on our website here:

http://cfer.org/newsletter/

Minneapolis Mayor Betsy Hodges Discusses the Benefits of Ranked Choice Voting

2014-09-26T22:00:00.000-07:00

Mayor Betsy Hodges of Minneapolis discusses the benefits of Ranked Choice Voting (aka Instant Runoff Voting), including how it allowed for more democratic engagement during the 2013 mayoral campaign and how it's helped her govern.

(Direct link)

Santa Clarita Embraces Cumulative Voting

2014-04-01T20:24:00.001-07:00

The city of Santa Clarity, California is taking steps to adopt cumulative voting. Cumulative voting is a voting system that can promote more proportional representation and avoid having to use single-winner districts.

Read more here:

http://hometownstation.com/santa-clarita-news/santa-clarita-votes-settle-california-voting-rights-act-lawsuit-40805

Instant Runoff Voting to be considered for Santa Clara County on January 7, 2014

2013-12-30T12:32:00.000-08:00

Good news: Instant Runoff Voting will be on the agenda of the Santa Clara County Citizens' Advisory Commission on Elections on January 7, 2014 (meeting starts at 6PM). Please come and show your support for better elections by attending and speaking in favor of IRV!

Instant Runoff Voting (also known as Ranked Choice Voting) is a method of casting and counting ballots in which voters rank candidates in order of preference. IRV has been used around the world for over 100 years and has been successfully implemented in a number of US and Bay Area locations, including San Francisco, Minneapolis, Berkeley, and Oakland. IRV brings a number of improvements over traditional voting, including:

Eliminates the spoiler effect, allowing people to vote their conscience
Reduces negative campaigning
Saves money on unnecessary run-offs
Saves voter time and avoids low voter turn-out

Santa Clara County voters have already approved IRV: In 1998, Measure F changed the County Charter to authorize the use of IRV in elections for county offices. Thus the discussion is not around changing the law to allow/require use of IRV, but encouraging the advisory commission to recommend that the Board of Supervisors act under that authorization to use IRV for county elections (and how to prepare).

Show your support for IRV by attending the Commission meeting on Tuesday, January 7, 2014 at the following location:

County Government Center

Isaac Newton Senter Auditorium (1st Floor)

70 W. Hedding Street

San Jose, CA 95110

Study: Open Primaries do not Reduce Partisanship

2013-12-23T17:11:00.001-08:00

On NPR's Morning Edition on December 18th, David Greene and Shankar Vedantam did a story concerning research performed by political scientist Nolan McCarty. After studying thousands of elections, McCarty concluded that open primaries do not reduce partisanship, because the moderates reformers want to vote in those primaries just don't.

The way to reduce partisanship, according to McCarty, is to have stronger political parties, because parties want to win elections and parties that have better control over who they nominate can nominate moderates. But how do we get stronger political parties? McCarty doesn't say, but CfER believes that that requires proportional representation (PR). PR will allow the extremists frustrated with their "big tent" parties to split off and form their own parties, allowing the larger parties to become more focused and thus stronger.

Fixing Congress with Fair Representation Voting (via FairVote)

2013-11-23T23:57:00.000-08:00

FairVote posted a nice video on YouTube showing how Congress would benefit from fair representation

Minnesota Voters Share Their Experiences with Ranked Choice Voting

2013-11-07T08:46:00.001-08:00

http://youtu.be /JgVp0WDANhk

Some useful videos about instant runoff voting

2013-08-31T13:44:00.005-07:00

Minnesota Public Radio News: Instant Runoff Voting Explained
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_5SLQXNpzsk

Minnesota Public Radio News: How Instant Runoff Voting Works 2.0: Multiple Winners
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lNxwMdI8OWw

Fairvote.org: Instant Runoff Voting (the "ABC" video)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wqblOq8BmgM

Taking the Futility out of "Contact Your Representative!"

2013-04-18T22:59:00.002-07:00

There are a lot of excuses we all come up with when we’re told to write to our elected officials about an issue. Here are a few that come to mind for me:

Meh. That issue isn’t very important to me, I’ll let you folks fight that one out.
Hmmm. I’ll keep my eye on that one and see if it amounts to something.
Yeikes! My baby’s diaper needs to be changed and my other kid just started building a fort in the dishwasher.
YES! My representative is already a champion of that issue, no need for me to contact them about it.
ARGH! My representative is strongly opposed to what I think about that issue, contacting them would be a waste of time.

Proportional representation -- the umbrella term for methods of electing legislative representatives in proportion to their popular support -- can’t help me un-fort my dishwasher, but it can help make it much more likely that I’d elect at least one representative who’s interested and motivated to listen to my views.

Consider the case of Representative Maud E. Rhet and voter Connie S. Vertif. Is it worth Connie’s time to write to Rep. Rhet to beg and plead for her causes if she knows that Rep. Rhet’s views on those causes are diametrically opposed to hers? It’s certainly a noble thing to register dissent, but it’s hard to imagine it would change the way Rep. Rhet will vote, especially if Connie’s view isn’t already popular. As Connie gets out her quill and ink to write to Rep. Rhet, it occurs to her that if the shoe were on the other foot, the best she herself could do is be polite, but not actually change how she’d vote on this issue, because of the views in a letter that are out of step with A) what she believe in and B) her constituency; which only needs to be 50% + some safe margin of the electorate. And so, the quill and ink are put away.

The same holds for situations in which a representative strongly agrees with a given citizen: Picture the happy voter; every morning his representative in the newspaper fighting for 4 out of 5 of the issues he cares about. Sure, it might be worth it to write about that 5th issue (if you don’t already know that your representative disagrees strongly with you about it), but even so, 4 of those 5 issues are things that aren’t ripe for influencing the way your representative will vote by contacting them.

Political systems should be structured so that expressions of voters’ will -- expressed both at the ballot box and the times in between -- influence how governments behave. With proportional representation, the situation described above would likely play out differently: When a voter is represented by a delegation of, say, ten representatives, it’s much more likely that there will be at least one representative who could be influenced by a voter reaching out and expressing their opinion. And representatives have something to gain under proportional representation systems for paying attention to such a voter, because figuring out a position that strongly appeals to smaller groups of voters makes sense under proportional representation, whereas in a system like we have today, issues are often fought on one side or the other of a two-party divide. Not only is a voter likely to have representatives who are ripe for influence, but a voter is also likely to have one or more representatives who strongly agree with their position in the first place (a 50-50 prospect at best in the “single winner” district system of today).

No election system will ever be a magic bullet for everything, and the same is true for proportional representation: It won’t change my kid’s diaper, but it does offer the change to increase civic engagement by knocking several big items off of the list of reasons not to engage, which is just one of many big improvements proportional representation brings over traditional election methods.

--Mike Hunter

The Alternative Vote Explained (VIDEO)

2013-04-09T23:30:00.000-07:00

Another great video, this time on the alternative vote:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Y3jE3B8HsE

The Problems with First Past the Post Voting Explained (VIDEO)

2013-04-02T23:27:00.001-07:00

Here's a great video that explains the problem with First Past the Post (aka "winner-take-all") voting systems:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s7tWHJfhiyo

2012 Bay Area Ranked Choice Elections

2012-08-26T22:43:00.000-07:00

The November 2012 election featured 5 contests in Oakland that were competitive enough to require elimination rounds. San Francisco had 2, and San Leandro had 2. There was an upset in Oakland's city council district 3, where the second-place candidate in the first round took the lead in the end. The contest in San Francisco's district 7 was very close. Separate pages provide more info about the San Francisco and East Bay contests.

Video: Richard Winger at SF Supervisors' meeting

2012-07-26T22:21:00.001-07:00

Richard Winger speaks to the San Francisco Board of Supervisors on July 17, 2012.

Video: Paul Perkovic addresses San Mateo County Supervisors

2012-07-26T08:02:00.000-07:00

Paul Perkovic, former president of the Montara Water and Sanitary District (MWSD) who also served on the Midcoast Community Council, speaks during the public comment period at the San Mateo County Board of Supervisors meeting on June 26, 2012. He noted that a proportional representation method using ranked choice voting would be a much fairer way to address voting rights concerns than a proposed switch to plurality elections within districts drawn by the supervisors.

Video: David Cary addresses San Mateo County Supervisors

2012-07-26T06:00:00.000-07:00

David Cary delivers a public comment to the San Mateo County Board of Supervisors on June 26, 2012 against proposals to switch to elect board members through plurality elections by voters within districts. The county currently elects board members from districts, but all voters in the county vote for each seat. As a result, the largest bloc of voters in the county can elect the entire board. The current system is the subject of a pending California Voting Rights Act lawsuit.

SF RCV Attacks Thwarted

2012-07-25T23:14:00.000-07:00

An effort to curtail the use of Ranked Choice Voting in San Francisco has been defeated for the time being.

Supervisor Mark Farrell led an effort (announced on Election Day, 2011) to repeal RCV in San Francisco. His stated reasons include specious arguments (rebutted here) about how RCV hurts minorities and that RCV is confusing for voters (based in large part on polls with deceptive wording sponsored by the San Francisco Chamber of Commerce). After initially being defeated in early 2012, Farrell (along with Sean Elsbernd) resurrected their proposal with minor changes in March. It appeared for a while that the repeal would be placed on the ballot because of the surprise support of Supervisor Christina Olague, who initially co-sponsored Farrell's new proposal but eventually advanced her own proposal to repeal RCV just for mayor. Supervisor David Chiu put forward a compromise proposal in which the mayoral race would use RCV in the general election, but if no mayoral candidate had 50% of first-choice votes, the top two finishers as computed with RCV tallying would advance to a December runoff. The Chiu proposal's preservation of RCV in the first round preserves many of the benefits of the system and won the support of many RCV supporters.

After an intensive effort to lobby Supervisor Olague and remind her of the importance of and support for RCV among her constituency, she appeared ready to also support the Chiu proposal. Once it was clear that Farrell's proposal would be pitted against a superior alternative at the ballot, Farrell pulled support for his own proposal, claiming that "having two proposals would be too confusing."

The San Francisco Chronicle then published a fallacious editorial accusing supervisor Chiu of "sabotage" for introducing his compromise and goes on to insinuate that RCV undermines "one person, one vote," a position that has been rejected by every court that has considered RCV.

While this effort has been thwarted, the battle to defend Ranked Choice Voting in San Francisco will continue. CfER will continue outreach efforts to explain RCV and its benefits to San Francisco voters, and to shed light on the forces trying to end RCV and their motivations.

CfER's Website Has Grown a Blog!

2012-07-25T21:10:00.000-07:00

This blog, http://CaliforniansForElectoralReform.blogger.com, has been created to help CfER give more frequent updates to the website about electoral reform activities happening in California and around the world. Please join CfER to get subscribed to our mailing lists for up-to-the-minute reports on what's happening and how you can get involved.

The Unintended Consequences of Top-Two

2012-05-16T21:25:00.000-07:00

CfER members are working to minimize damage caused by Prop 14, the June 2010 ballot measure approved by voters to adopt non-partisan blanket primaries for all state and federal offices except President. Many aspects of Prop 14 reduce voters' ability to elect their preferred candidate. We are members of StopTopTwo.org, a broad coalition of organizations. For more on CfER's role see our campaign page.

Slanted Reporting Against RCV Exposed

2012-01-18T21:09:00.000-08:00

A CfER member helped to expose slanted reporting by several newspapers against ranked-choice voting in San Francisco, amidst an ongoing effort by wealthy interest groups to repeal RCV and impose a system that restricts voter choice, reduces voter participation, and is more easily manipulated by heavy campaign spending.

Another Successful RCV Election in SF

2011-11-14T21:46:00.000-08:00

San Francisco conducted highly successful ranked-choice contests for mayor, sheriff, and district attorney in November.

CfER Survey at CA GOP Meeting

2011-09-01T21:45:00.000-07:00

CfER conducted an insightful ranked-choice survey at a recent meeting of the state Republican party.

Ranked Choice Voting Upheld by Ninth Circuit!

2011-05-20T21:24:00.000-07:00

The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals has upheld Ranked Choice Voting in a legal challenge filed by a losing candidate and financed by wealthy special interest groups.

Timely Reporting of RCV Results

2010-03-17T21:48:00.000-07:00

CfER advocates timely reporting of results in ranked-choice voting. San Francisco's registrar of voters accelerated release of a full RCV count in last November's election.