Weighted voting has been used for decades by over a dozen County Boards of Supervisors in New York State. Each supervisor is the chief executive of his or her respective town, and each gets votes on the County Board in proportion to the number of residents in his or her town.
In some counties, though, each supervisor’s legislative power has been significantly greater or less than his or her number of votes would indicate, which has prompted several lawsuits. Two extreme examples can illustrate the point.
Consider a three-person board where the members’ respective number of votes is 3, 4 and 5. Any two members can carry a motion. Therefore, each member has equal power, despite having a substantially different number of votes.
At the other extreme, consider the Nassau (NY) County Board of Supervisors in 1993. The members’ respective voting power was 9, 9, 7, 3, 1 and 1. How the latter three members cast their votes made no difference in whether a motion passed or not. In effect, those three members had no direct power — only the power to persuade the other members to change their positions. The Federal District Court ruled that the three towns with the least votes were in effect unrepresented in county government. The court’s remedy was to divide the county into districts of equal population. (See Jackson et al. v. Nassau County Board of Supervisors.)
This case has little bearing on PAR, though, because the jurisdictions in question — the six towns — were geographical entities. So using another geographic method was not inherently unfair. Any geographic boundaries within the county would be a largely arbitrary basis for representation. Most residents of the three smallest towns may even have felt they gained by the court’s ruling: from having only indirect influence on county legislation, to having some direct influence.
But would voters in a PAR election feel the same way? Would the voters represented by the members with least power prefer to have some voice in the legislative process — have someone who could try to persuade the most powerful members to alter their stances — or have no voice at all? Most voters would likely prefer the former position. So on what grounds could a court rule that another election process would be fairer to those voters? We cannot see any such grounds.
Other cases might have more bearing on PAR: when each representative could influence legislation but not as often as his or her voting power would indicate. For instance, suppose that town supervisor Jones had 12 percent of the votes but, given all the possible permutations of how the six-member board could vote, his vote would determine whether a motion passed or failed only 8 percent of the time. Some New York State courts have ruled that in such cases each supervisor’s voting power should be adjusted to more accurately reflect the power he or she “should” have. (See Iannucci v. Board of Supervisors of Washington County.)
These circumstances differ significantly from PAR, though, in two ways:
- The citizens affected by the ruling did not choose to be represented based on what town they lived in. The county charter specified that each town supervisor represent its residents. So the court could reasonably conclude that some county residents had less power than others based on pure circumstances. On that grounds, adjusting the town supervisors’ respective power made some sense.
But that would not hold true with PAR. Ctizens themselves would have chosen their representative among a large field. And voters for the least popular winners would often know upfront that they were voting for candidates who, if they won, would have less power than others. For any court to rule that the voters for the least powerful lawmakers should then get some premium would make little sense.
- In the New York court case, the policymakers in question were not primarily lawmakers. They were elected to be chief executives of their respective towns. Representing their towns at the county level was an ancillary duty. So when the courts imposed complex formulas adjusting the supervisors’ power in their secondary positions at the county level, most voters may have cared little, if at all.
If a court made a similar ruling about a PAR election, though, most voters might not understand the formula, which could weaken the legitimacy of the representative process in voters’ eyes. We would therefore suggest to any court that tinkering with the proportionality would have substantially more negative effects than positive ones.
Finally, in the one case we know of in which a Federal Appeals Court ruled on weighted voting based on population, the court upheld the weighting without any modifications. (See Roxbury Taxpayers Alliance et al. v. Delaware County Board of Supervisors.)
All that being said, we cannot predict what some courts might do in the future. If and when a community adopts PAR, someone or some group may file suit against the proportionality. But even if some court does modify lawmakers’ relative voting power, PAR elections would still retain their major advantages over other election methods: creating a far stronger bond between citizens and lawmakers than other elections now in use.