« Obama for President | Main | Kerry Will Win »

Vote No on At-Large Seats in Urbana

My apologies to all of you who have told me you continue to check this page looking for new entries. Several months ago I was feeling like the other blogs out there were doing a great job of covering the things I had been writing about (and usually they wrote them up before I had a chance). In the last couple months, I have been largely distracted from the national politics scene altogether. I have instead been paying attention to local politics.

Well, actually I'm always paying attention to local politics, but its just been more than usual lately. As someone who watches the city council almost every week on cable, I seem to fall into a somewhat rare category.

Enough of that. The issue I've been paying attention to is an effort by some in the city to add "at-large" seats to the Urbana City Council (Illinois). Currently the council is elected by districts (called "wards" in Urbana), and there are seven of them. There will be a referendum on the ballot this November to add two at-large seats to the seven ward seats. What makes them "at-large" is that they are elected city-wide as opposed to ward-wide.

So what's the big deal? Well, my first clue that something might be wrong was that this question was pushed onto the ballot at the last minute, without any formal study or public hearing. My second is that some of its roots are clearly political, based on conflicts between the council and mayor. But aside from that, I decided to investigate the question for myself--What are the problems and benefits to at-large elections?

So I set out reading all of the major scientific literature on the topic from the last 35 years. What I found has led me to become one of the leaders of a campaign against the referendum. The campaign is called Vote No At-Large. Those of you that know me know I follow politics closely, but aside from photography, rarely get particularly involved. So what's so bad about at-large that its drawn me in like this?

Since I've already written a bunch on this, I'm not going to rehash it all here, but I'll touch on one major issue with at-large--that it dilutes minority representation in local government.

At-large seats are effective in diluting the minority vote because they require candidates to run city-wide as opposed to district-wide. Minority neighborhood districts are more likely to elect minority candidates. But at-large seats, with voters taken from anywhere in the city, typically elect majority candidates. This has been proven time and again in study after study, making it one of the most verified findings in the field of political science.

A few quotes for illustrative effect:

"...few generalizations in political science appear to be as well verified as the proposition that at-large elections tend to be discriminatory toward Black Americans." (Engstrom, 1986)

�At-large voting schemes � tend to minimize the voting strength of minority groups by permitting the political majority to elect all representatives of the district.� (U.S. Supreme Court, in Rogers v. Lodge, 458 U.S. 613 (1982))

�This Court has long recognized that multimember districts and at-large voting schemes may �operate to minimize or cancel out the voting strength of racial [minorities in] the voting population.� The theoretical basis for this type of impairment is that where minority and majority voters consistently prefer different candidates, the majority, by virtue of its numerical superiority, will regularly defeat the choices of minority voters.� (U.S. Supreme Court, in Thornburg v. Gingles, 478 U.S. 30 (1986))

�Blacks are still most equitably represented by district elections�� (Welch, 1990)

As convincing as it is, one need not solely rely on empirical evidence in the scientific literature for examples of how at-large affects minority representation. Right here in central Illinois we have plenty of examples:

While Springfield and Danville�s electoral systems were fully at-large, the system being proposed in Urbana is referred to as a �mixed� system�one made up of both districts and at-large. Proponents of the proposed change suggest this is an important distinction, one which makes all of the scientific evidence �irrelevant.� But the leading scholars in political science have studied mixed systems as well. Susan Welch, a leading researcher on the effects of at-large elections on minority representation, and Dean and Professor of Political Science at Penn State University states it clearly: �While blacks are equitably represented in the district portions of mixed systems, they are abysmally underrepresented in the at-large portions.�

Frankly I can even keep going with examples, but I won't belabor the point any further. At-large has all kinds of other problems--it injects big money into local government (citywide campaigns require lots of money), and it produces candidates out-of-touch with the citizens (since citywide campaigns can't knock on all doors they knock on few and instead rely on media saturation).

In fact, most cities are abandoning at-large, not adding them back.

If you find this interesting and want to follow the campaign more closely, get involved, donate, or anything else, please see the Vote No At-Large website, which is homebase for the campaign. Other information on the website includes a literature review I wrote on the topic of at-large elections, statements from our campaign kickoff press conference, and the text of the NAACP's resolution endorsing a "no" vote against at-large in Urbana. The site will catalog things as they come up, so please check there for updates, as I probably won't post much here.

Posted on September 26, 2004 12:25 AM

Comments

Trackback Pings

TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://www.criticalviewer.com/mt-tb.cgi/59