The problem of “excess candidature” under anti-party institutions
Oregon Public Broadcasting reported yesterday that the city of Portland is considering increasing the number of signatures filing fee a person needs to pay to appear on the ballot at a local election. I quote: “The city had 19 mayoral candidates [for one seat] and 98 city council candidates [for 12 seats] in its first ranked choice election.”
Excess candidature is a problem when we use non-list electoral rules to make collective choices under fragmentation conditions. There are two related issues. One is that the voter needs to wade through the pile to arrive at a sensible set of ballot markings. Another is that candidates within the same “bloc” can end up spoiling each other.
One solution about which I’ve written extensively — and that I recommended when the Portland reform proposal was taking shape — is to embrace pre-election lists.
Here is an old blog post in which I make a similar argument about Philadelphia’s at-large council seats: “All of the above candidates could run in the general without spoiling their party. There would be no further need to limit nominations by law.”
Finally, here is a report I wrote with Kevin Kosar and Jaehun Lee of AEI about the Portland election in question. We argued that the reform package did increase both council and candidate-pool diversity. However, I suspect this had more to do with the expanded council size than with “proportional ranked-choice voting” (P-RCV). All but one of 12 winners were leaders in first-choice votes. This suggests that limited voting with one vote (i.e., single non-transferable vote) might have produced the same result in 11 of 12 cases.
Would a list system have produced the same result? It is impossible to say. However, look at the large number of candidates in each district whose first-choice vote shares were much less than a Droop quota (the number of votes a person needs to win in P-RCV). These are shown just above in a data visualization from my report with Kosar and Lee. It is interesting to think about what might have happened if votes for these candidates also counted toward whatever party lists they might have joined.
The usual case for anti-party electoral reforms is that they help communities “build power” by forming coalitions around issues otherwise suppressed by the party alignment in place. The Portland result makes me wonder if a list mechanism might in fact be better for that.
Please see this report (with John Ketcham) if you are interested in how I think big cities might want to approach electoral reform going forward.