Program for Representative Government: Challenging Winner-Take-All with Proportional Voting
Our Program for Representative Government engages in community education, media outreach and cutting-edge research to demonstrate how winner-take-all legislative elections lead to uncompetitive elections, under-representation of women and communities of color, regional polarization and unfair partisan advantage. We research, advocate and educate the public about proportional representation voting systems. Through proportional voting systems, like-minded groupings of voters win legislative seats in better proportion to their share of the population. Whereas winner-take-all elections award 100% of power to a 50.1% majority, proportional voting allows voters in a minority to win a fair share of representation. It describes a broad range of methods that require at least some legislators to be elected in districts with more than one seat, under the basic principle that seats should be proportionally awarded to candidates, based on their share of the overall vote. In the United States proportional representation is perhaps best known for its use in allocating delegates in all Democratic presidential nomination contests and in several Republican nomination contests. Proportional voting systems already used in local legislative elections in the United States include choice voting (voters rank candidates, and seats are allocated by efficiently distributing voters preferences using a proportional formula), cumulative voting (voters cast as many votes as seats and can give multiple votes to one candidate), and limited voting (voters have fewer votes than seats). We see choice voting as the best candidate-based system for securing proportional representation and accommodating voter choice.