Call to Change

The United States and its respective states is one of the only democracies in the world other than the UK and Canada to use plurality or FPTP (first past the post) voting. I wrote on proportional voting in a white paper earlier this year. It solves the issue of legislatures whose compositions don’t closely mirror the vote share for each party and encourages more political parties among other positive ramifications.

Minnesota has been a leader in civic engagement for many years and has a history of 3rd party streaks, making it the perfect testing ground for proportional voting. It should be implemented in the state legislature, which should be made unicameral as Nebraska’s state house is.

Proposals

Proportional voting is a large umbrella of different systems, a couple of which could be implemented in Minnesota. All of these assume only the Minnesota House, but these ideas could be easily scaled for the Senate as well.

STV

One way to achieve proportional voting in the legislature would be to create 16 house districts with 9 seats each for a total of 144 seats. This is a 10 seat increase from the current size of the House. The districts would look something like this:

Single transferable vote (STV) with full preferential voting would be used in this new system. Voters would fill out an ordinally ranked ballot as in single winner ranked choice voting, however, they’d have to rank all candidates or have their ballot spoilt. Ballots are tallied and a quota is ascertained. The droop quota should be used, which in this case would be

$$ \lfloor \frac{V}{10} \rfloor + 1 $$

where $$ V $$ is the number of non-spoiled votes. The following process is iterated until all seats are filled:

1. If a candidate reaches or exceeds the quota, they’re awarded a seat
2. If a candidate has a surplus of votes in excess of the quota, they are apportioned to the second choice of the voters who cast those votes
3. If the number of candidates exceeds the number of seats to fill, the candidate with the least support is eliminated

Given large districts, the results are roughly proportional. Coupled with this reform would be a provision that mandates that there be no less than one representative per 40,000 people. This would involve readjusting the number of seats every decade with each Census. To ensure that districts stay large and relatively uniform, this plan would enforce a district size of 9. Exceptions would be made in the event that the number of seats isn’t a multiple of 9 such that some districts could have 10 seats.

One alteration of this proposal would be to use re-weighted range voting as the voting mechanism, holding all else constant. I detailed in my white paper, so I’ll spare the details here.

DMP

Dual Member Proportional (DMP) voting is another attractive method of proportional voting for Minnesota. Voters are given a unified ballot with each option being for both a party as well as up to 2 candidates (smaller parties will probably opt for 1). Unlike mixed member proportional (MMP), districts have two seats. After all votes are tallied, the first seat is chosen via FPTP. Remaining seats are determined by the following methods:

1. A list is made of all candidates sorted by proportion of vote share in their district
2. Seats are assigned tentatively to the most popular candidate in each party
3. In cases where two or more candidates are assigned to a single seat, the candidate with the largest percentage of the vote take precedent and all others are eliminated

Like MMP, DMP typically uses a threshold of 5% or so. Unlike MMP, there aren’t any leveling seats and all candidates chosen are geographically bound to their districts. As I said in my paper, Minnesota would be a good candidate to pilot this in via using our existing Senate districts, which are split into an A and a B side already. Like in the last proposal, there should be a mandate that there be no less than one representative per 40,000 with a rounding rule to ensure that the number of seats is always even.

Time to Organize

We have excessively procrastinated on the kind of electoral reform most other countries have implemented half a century or more ago. Proportional voting will increase voter turnout, make it easier for neglected groups to have their voices heard, and force consensus. Minnesota is the perfect test bed for this and a grassroots effort needs to be created to get our state legislators to pass legislation that makes this a reality.