Cumulative Voting in a Municipal Election: a Note on Voter Reactions and Electoral Consequences

Abstract

C UMULATIVE voting was used to elect members of a local governing body in the United States for the first time this century when, in July of 1987, The City of Alamogordo, New Mexico employed that voting system to elect part of its city council. This was the first use of the system in any public election in this country since the State of Illinois, in 1980, adopted a single-member districting arrangement to elect the lower chamber of its state legislature, thereby abandoning the system of cumulative voting within three-member districts it had been using for over 100 years.2 Rules permitting cumulative voting may be employed in conjunction with any multimember district. If voters in such a district are provided with more than one vote, cumulative voting allows them to aggregate or cumulate their votes behind a particular candidate or candidates if they wish. For example, in a three-seat, three-vote situation, voters have the option of casting their votes in the traditional manner, giving each of three different candidates one of their votes, or they may cast two votes for one candidate and one for another, or even cast all three votes for one candidate. Cumulative voting, in short, allows voters to do more than choose among candidates, it allows them to express the intensity of their preferences as well (see generally Lakeman 1974: 87-90).