Voting Systems: A Primer

Austin: Places At Large

What Austin has now is a place system -- wherein all the candidates are running for specific seats, decided by a simple majority vote, but all the races are decided by the city at large. Austin is the largest city in America, and the only major city in Texas, that elects its entire council this way. And unlike most cities with unusual electoral practices, Austin's are not remnants of a pre-modern era; the place system has only existed since 1953, though it's been modified since. (To see what everyone else does, see the chart on p.28.)

Districts

By far the most common mode is a district system, wherein each council member represents and is elected by voters in a specific geographic area. We usually talk about "single-member districts," since that's most common and, of course, also the way we elect members of Congress and legislators in every state. It's also how 19th-century Austin elected its council. But there are cities -- Baltimore and Memphis being the largest -- that employ multi-member districts, which are likewise popular overseas.

Prop-Rep

The other main departure from Austin's current system is proportional representation, or "prop-rep" for short. This is a slippery term describing many different systems, but their shared hallmark is that the candidates all run as a group for the same set of seats, voters get to vote for more than one, and the top vote-getters win. Prop-rep has a vociferous cult following, but few American cities still use it in pure form -- Detroit is the largest, and the second-largest, San Francisco, is going back to single-member districts next year. Between 1909 and 1953, Austin's council -- then only five members -- was elected through prop-rep.

Mixed Bag

More common are mixed systems with both district and at-large seats, the latter often chosen through prop-rep. Such systems are a latter-day trend in American municipal politics. Unfortunately, perhaps, prop-rep in any form -- indeed, any system that doesn't involve a straight majority vote for each seat -- has since 1989 been illegal in Texas for cities with more than 200,000 people. So Houston, the largest city in Texas (and America) with a mixed system, still has to elect its at-large members by place. Rep. Glen Maxey, whose aide Eddie Rodriguez sits on Austin's Charter Revision Committee, tried to change this Election Code provision this last session, but his bills were left pending in committee.

The Exotics

Then there are lesser-tried but theoretically seductive postmodern electoral strategies. There is preferential voting (used notably in Australia), wherein voters rank-order all the candidates in a race, with the winner divined through complex number-crunching. And there is cumulative voting (used in a number of small towns and school districts in Texas and elsewhere), which is a form of prop-rep where, instead of voting for five people, you can vote for the same person five times, or one person thrice and another twice, or whatever. Adopting such a system here, in one of America's biggest cities, would require some heavy lifting in the Legislature and perhaps at the federal level as well, but hey, Austin prides itself on being different and cutting-edge. --M.C.M