Court Oversight Research Articles

The limited vote alternative to affirmative districting

The Supreme Court may have effectively put affirmative districting off limits as a procedure to alleviate vote dilution in voting rights cases. If so, alternative voting systems seem logical, if not popular options. In this paper six voting systems at use in the US are evaluated utilizing nine measures of feasibility. Two traditional and popular voting systems — simple at-large, multi-seat and single-member districts — are compared to four alternatives — single transferable vote, cumulative voting, equal allocation cumulative voting and limited voting. The comparison along nine dimensions suggests that limited voting may be a viable alternative in situations where affirmative districting is not feasible or unlikely to withstand court oversight. Examination of jurisdictions in the US South which use limited voting shows that it is largely confined to Alabama and North Carolina. The results of elections before and after the adoption of limited voting shows that the number of minority candidates increases and their chance of winning goes up greatly when limited voting replaces simple at-large systems.