INSTANT RUNOFF VOTING SPREADING

NANCY VOGEL, LA TIMES - The cities of Davis, Calif.; Oakland and Minneapolis, as well as Pierce County, Wash.; have passed ballot measures that will lead to "instant runoff" or "proportional representation" voting in city and county elections. There was no organized opposition to the measures.

Their success has energized election reform advocates, who say the United States should join most other democracies and pick politicians in a way that doesn't shut out the 49% of voters who may have favored someone other than the majority winner. . .

For decades, Cambridge, Mass., has been the only American city to use the system. But in November, voters in Davis and Minneapolis approved proportional voting in city elections. . .

"It produces more of a mix of Democrats and Republicans that represent more of what we call purple California than red and blue California," said Steven Hill, political reform director for the nonprofit, nonpartisan New America Foundation. . .

In a November poll of 600 California voters, the foundation found that 52% said instant runoff voting sounded like a good idea. Half of those surveyed favored proportional voting. Nearly 70% said they feel like they often must vote for "the lesser of two evils."

Almost every democracy outside of Britain, Canada and the United States uses some version of proportional voting, including Australia, Germany, Japan, New Zealand and South Africa. The new voting systems in Afghanistan and Iraq are proportional too.

In the United States, two dozen cities used the system in the early 1900s. All but Cambridge had abandoned it by the 1960s, and Illinois voters stopped using it to elect state lawmakers after a 1980 initiative . . .

According to a history written by Douglas Amy, a Mount Holyoke College politics professor, some cities jettisoned proportional voting along with other corruption-busting Progressive Era reforms such as replacing mayors.

New York City, where a Communist was elected to the City Council in the 1940s, abandoned the method during the Cold War era after Democrats decried it as a "political importation from the Kremlin."

Cincinnati rejected the system in 1957 after a campaign in which opponents asked whether the city wanted a "Negro Mayor." Proportional voting had allowed African Americans to win seats on the City Council for the first time in the city's history. . .

http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-voting25dec25,1,4207139,full.story


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