I agree with Steve. I prefer 3 wards of 5 members each to 5 wards with
three members each.
You get one vote either way, not 3 or 5. So if there are three seats, 26%
is enuf to elect (3 x 26 = 78, leaving only 22% - not enuf to elect). If
there are 5 seats, 17% is enuf (5 x 17 = 85, leaving only 15% - not enuf
to elect).
5 seats leaves fewer "wasted votes" - 15% vs 22%. 85% elect someone, vs
78%.
With 5 seats, the DFL might win 2 or 3, Reform 0 or 1 or 2, GOP 1 or 2,
Greens 1 or 2. (We won't know for sure till we try it and people know
their votes will _really_ count.)
Wit 3 seats, the DFL would win 1 or 2, Reform 0 or 1, GOP 1, Greens 0 or
1.
Either way the DFL would lose its 11/13s of the council, so we can imagine
there will be few DFL incumbents for any change. They would be inclined to
call any change "ill-advised". But the city is not 11/13 DFL, so the
result would be fairer to the voters.
On the other hand, either alternative offers more opportunity to
NON-incumbents to win. If you live in ward X, and the DFL incumbent has
been there for 10 years and might keep on running for another 20, you
pretty much have to MOVE to have a chance. But to where? And if you are
GOP or Reform or Green, the old system gives you next to no chance, but
the new one almost guarantees some new people will, and makes incumbency
much less powerful. It OPENS UP THE SYSTEM. If you're in it, you like it
closed; if you're outside, you like it open. In our present system, the
incumbents are inside, challengers and we the citizens on the outside. Are
the incumbents more important than challengers, an open system, and we the
citizens? So the incumbents would tell us.
Next point: at one time there were 26 council members. If we like the idea
of 5 districts, we could have 5 districts of 5 members each. The same
wider representation, but more "locality" if that's important to you.
What's most important to me is getting rid of the SAFE SEAT, the single
member winner-take-all district (that's what we have today), where the
incumbent has little chance of being replaced, and where (in Mpls) parties
other than the DFL get at most 2 of 13 seats.
We speak about being a country founded on open competition. We like to
talk of level playing fields. We don't like restrictive tariffs or biases
for special interests. How about applying our talk to our elections?
--David Shove
On Sat, 23 Sep 2000, Steven C. Anderson wrote:
> At 03:17 PM 9/22/2000 -0500, Greg Abbott wrote:
> >on 9/21/2000 1:35 PM, Russell Wayne Peterson at [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
> >
> >Actually, I kind of like the idea of 5 wards with 3 council members per ward
> >-- one of the scenarios I discussed which would likely be constitutional.
> >With proportional representation, I suspect such a system would produce a
> >council with 10 DFL'rs and 5 non-DFL'rs.
>
> How about 3 wards of 5 members? I prefer lower thresholds for the number
> of votes that will get a new voice to the table. It's more representative,
> and brings about more interesting debate.
>
> What would that be... I think North and Northeast grouped together make 1/3,
> while South Minneapolis would basically be split in half, with a small
> measure of North thrown in near the boundary. Perhaps it would make sense
> to have an "inner" section consisting of the area nearer downtown (including
> downtown and some of North) and an "outer" section for the areas further south.
>
> Proportional representation systems aren't hard to vote in, once you pick
> one, but it can get fairly complicated if you're trying to compare different
> systems.
>
> --
> [EMAIL PROTECTED] Steven C. Anderson Longfellow area of Minneapolis
> Running for Minnesota Senate, District 62: http://www.SteveAnderson.org
>
