Rob Richie
Editor's Note: The following op-ed originally published on the Expand Democracy Substack and was republished as a stand-alone piece by request and with permission from the author.
I’ve been a leading advocate of proportional representation (PR) since getting involved in a campaign to adopt PR in Thurston County (WA) in 1990 - an effort that led me to cofound FairVote (then “Citizens for Proportional Representation”) in 1992 and become its director for the next 31 years.
Over the years, I’ve generally advocated for fully proportional systems - such as the party-based system used in most nations that have PR and the proportional form of ranked choice voting (RCV, also known as the single transferable vote). But cumulative voting is another alternative to winner-take-all elections that has far more American uses today and is the one such alternative with a history in state legislative elections.
With growing debate occurring about whether the United States is ready for a full-blown multi-party system tied to party-based forms of PR, cumulative voting and other systems based on voting for candidates deserve more attention. Even if not “fully” proportional, cumulative voting would mean voters have more competitive choices and a greater likelihood of electing preferred candidates and be much more likely to create space for independents and new factions within the major parties.
My wife Cynthia Richie Terrell of RepresentWomen and I are using the term “voter representation systems” to describe such candidate-based alternatives to winner-take-all elections, as measures of their fairness are tied to voters more than parties. Through that lens, cumulative voting deserves attention because of how widely it is used and its important history in Illinois for state legislative elections.
What is Cumulative Voting?
As its name suggests, voters have an opportunity to “cumulate” their votes on one candidate in a multimember district electing more than one candidate. If electing three people, say, as is the case for me in my legislative elections in Maryland, voters wouldn’t be limited to casting one vote for up to three candidates. Instead, if they really liked one candidate, they could give that candidate all three of their votes. They could give two votes to one candidate and one vote to another.
Peoria (IL) offers a tabulation twist in its five-seat city council elections. The “equal and even” rule in Peoria for more than three decades means that you vote for one, two, three, four, or five candidates. If you vote for five candidates, they each get one vote. If you vote for one, that candidate gets five.
If you vote for a number of candidates in between, your votes are evenly allocated to those candidates – for example, voting for two candidates would mean they each get 2.5 votes. The Peoria ballot is eminently easy to administer, is simple for voters, and facilitates candidates running as a team.
Cumulative voting in practice
No organization closely tracks cumulative voting elections today, but the total number of uses of it is around 100, including school board elections in Amarillo (TX), city council elections in Port Chester (NY), and county commission elections in Chilton County (AL). These modern uses of cumulative voting all stem from voting rights cases, and studies show it has been an effective remedy for minority vote dilution without single-member districts.
It is also used widely in elections for corporate boards and homeowner associations.
The most intriguing use of cumulative voting from history is for elections of the Illinois House of Representatives from 1870 to 1980 in three-seat districts, where voters had cumulative voting rights in both the primaries (resulting in more diverse nominees) and general elections, with voters having the option to cast either a “Peoria”-style ballot or traditional cumulative voting ballot.
Adopted in the wake of the Civil War to avoid geographically polarized outcomes of confederate-leaning candidates in the southern part of Illinois and union allies in the north, cumulative voting was seen as working well to bridge divides from the start. Both parties nearly always were elected in all 60 legislative districts, and elected representatives had more freedom to legislate according to their conscience than in the winner-take-all state senate.
In 1980, a populist effort to shrink the legislature by a third and go to single-member districts won on the ballot in what was nicknamed the “Cutback amendment.” Cumulative voting was eliminated with that vote, and most Illinois leaders came to deeply regret it.
In 2015, I wrote a paper on cumulative voting in Illinois, bringing together findings from a commission recommending the restoration of cumulative voting and anecdotal interviews with state leaders about the negative impact of losing the system.
The paper is worth a skim, and I’ll highlight the qualities highlighted by a commission co-chaired by former federal judge and Democratic Congressman Abner Mikva and former Republican governor Jim Edgar that called for its return.
• Offers greater choice for voters in primary and general elections.
• Provides prospective candidates easier access to the electoral system.
• Provides greater representation for the minority political party in districts dominated by the other party.
• Provides individual legislators greater independence from legislative leaders.
• Generates richer deliberations and statewide consensus among all legislators since both parties would be represented in all parts of the state.
The commission’s recommendation led then-state senator Barack Obama in 2002 to introduce a bill allowing voters to restore cumulative voting. But powerful Democrats with a stranglehold on the House blocked it.
Because cumulative voting can “split votes,” it is not reliably proportional or “fair.” What made it work in Illinois was parties limiting their nominations to two in their three-seat house districts, and cumulative voting is less effective as a voting rights remedy when racial minority voters either split their vote among two candidates or have the voting power to elect more than one candidate.
That’s why most students of “voter representation” systems prefer proportional RCV. However, where PRCV can’t be done for administrative or legal reasons, cumulative voting should get serious consideration.