It’s a good way for single issue voter that are a minority to gain a seat at the table. I’m not sure if it’s ever been used in political elections. I just always liked the strategic possibilities.
I don’t understand the logic. Single issue voters are not a special minority of any sort. They’re probably more of a problem for Democracy than a positive.
Why do we want to make it easier for them to have a voice?
Now if you mean makes it easier for a 3rd party candidate to get a seat, that I could support.
Here’s the full post, I save it before I deleted it.
Has anyone ever proposed using cumulative voting for multi-winner political elections? Cumulative voting is a system frequently used in elections for 5 and 7 member boards. The idea is that if there are 7 open seats, everyone gets 7 votes and they can vote more than once for the same candidate. So the moderate voter that’s happy with the current board might vote once each for the 7 incumbents, and a single issue voter supporting a single issue candidate might vote 7 times for one person. Or if there are only two incumbents you can stand, you might vote 4 times for one and 3 times for the other.
It’s a good way for single issue voters that are a minority to gain a seat at the table. I’m not sure if it’s ever been used in political elections. I just always liked the strategic possibilities.
This was the whole point of “Civil Disobedience”, really, and Thoreau certainly saw it as a plus. The person willing to vote with their whole person, to throw their body into the machine, would always have more power than people who voted only with a ballot. He saw this as a failsafe, as people of conscience would be able to impact the ship of state.
It may be good for single issue voters, but from other points of view it looks dreadful. If you have seven seats to fill, and each voter has seven votes, then Party A, which has just 51% support can, if its voters are disciplined, secure up to 100% of the seats. Indeed, if Party A has just 40% support, and Parties B and C have 35% and 25% respectively, Party A can still win 100% of the seats. The whole point of multi-seat electorates is to facilitate representation of a diversity of views.
The reason I said “single issue voter” is that the concept comes from board elections, where political parties aren’t a thing. A typical scenario might be on an HOA board election, where there are a dozen people out of a hundred that really want something, say a community garden. Cumulative voting gives a them a path to get one of their people on a deeply entrenched board,
But if the concept were to be transferred to politics, it certainly would be used to boost the power of third party candidates. Because typically, the Dems and Pubbies would run 7 candidates for 7 seats, and the typical party line voter would vote once for each of the seven. If a third party only runs one candidate and has their supporters throw all their votes behind them, they might stand a chance at snagging one seat.
Sometimes those third party candidates might be single issue candidates, like the Right to Life Party or the Marijuana Party. But the most they can gain through this strategy is a seat at the table and a chance to be a spoiler. By only running one candidate, they trade any shot, no matter how long, at a majority for a greater chance for one voice.
Not knowing how it has worked out in the elections where its used, I think an issue with this is that there will likely be a small percentage of in the know voters who have enough of an idea of how everyone else is voting that they will have a massively outsized impact by concentrating their votes on only the candidate or candidates who are on the bubble. The candidates who are known to either win or lose big can be ignored. But a lot of random voters will just vote for people they like and unwittingly throw away a large percentage of their vote.
That’s where the strategy comes in, Party B and C can run fewer candidates to guarantee those candidates a larger share of the vote.
One of the downsides might be that it’s incredibly strategic and it favors the experienced people that know how to work the strategy. Which is why I always liked it - but my opponents frequently got blindsided,
I think I someone already mentioned this, but it would set up a situation comparable to the situation in Israel, where a vocal religious minority holds the rest of the country hostage with their hyper focus in one (or in this case, a small set of) issue.
If we had some alternative to all-or-nothing voting, political parties would have less of a lock on the process. Right now people will vote Democrat no matter what party planks they disagree with because the alternative is a Republican victory (or vice-versa). In most of Europe parliamentary systems work like this, two major parties and enough splinter groups to be able to bargain for a seat at the table in exchange for providing the swing votes.
The same result can be acheived much more reliable, and with much less vulnerability to scheming and strategising, just by using a single transferable vote rather than multiple votes. In a seven-seat elction, with STV, if the single issue movement or minor party can must as much as one-eight of the votes, they are pretty much guaranteed one seat. This isn’t vulnerable to how many candidates their opponents run.