Improving Local Government

IMPROVING LOCAL GOVERNMENT

Until now, towns, cities and counties have been limited to flawed methods for electing their legislatures: single member districts, at-large plurality voting or proportional representation. We believe all of these methods can be improved on.

With district representation, lawmakers focus on the needs of their own neighborhoods, often at the expense of the community as a whole. Also, all the residents of a neighborhood -- no matter how diverse -- have to share the same representative, which means that many citizens don't get a representative who reflects what's important to them. Interest groups dispersed throughout the community may not be represented at all.

With at-large voting, lawmakers can better express community-wide concerns, but the majority gets all the council seats. Minorities are effectively denied any representation. Also, citizens don't get a specific representative who is accountable to them.

Many communities have switched back and forth between district elections and at-large plurality voting, suggesting that neither one inspires much public confidence or produces very satisfying policy decisions.

A few communities have tried proportional representation (PR) which guarantees minorities representation. However, the mechanics of PR virtually severs the connection between lawmakers and the people who elected them. Every American city that has tried PR -- save one, Cambridge, Massachusetts -- has rescinded it, a testament to the fact that PR has not produced better government.

A new electoral system, Interactive Representation (IR), solves the dilemma. It promises all groups, local or otherwise, more accurate representation, while giving each citizen a specific representative. IR merges the principles of conflict resolution with proportional representation. It is specifically designed to promote public policy that optimally satisfies a community's many conflicting needs.

An IR election works as follows:

Candidates for the city council or county legislature run at-large or in districts with at least three legislators.

On their ballot, each voter lists, in order, the candidates they prefer.

If a voter's first choice wins a seat, that person becomes their representative. If not, the voter gets his or her second choice, and so on.

To achieve this result, ballots are counted as follows: The candidate with the fewest votes is out of the running. All the votes he or she received go to her supporters' second choices. Then the next lowest-drawing candidate is eliminated. And so on, until there are as many candidates left as there are seats to fill.

After the election, each voter is mailed a card that lists the winners in their district. Citizens who want to be in direct communication with their representative simply mail him or her the card. They can then receive regular reports about his or her legislative work.

So that the council will accurately reflect the various constituencies, each representative gets voting power proportional to the number of votes he or she received.

When legislators are elected this way, the entire community is represented. Each representative speaks for a united constituency.

To accomplish anything, however, the representatives have to negotiate, find common ground and resolve their conflicts. Will they? With IR, they are far more likely to because each representative can explain to his or her own constituents -- in their own terms -- why negotiation and trade-offs were necessary to advance their interests. Thus each representative becomes both an advocate for his or her constituents and an advocate to them for the community as a whole.

The effect of IR on citizens? On one hand, they are better represented. No one is left out. Also, people become more politically realistic because lawmakers have the opportunity to explain, in terms their constituents will understand, why negotiation is necessary if anything is to be achieved.

When anyone picks up the phone to talk to their council member, they are talking to someone who agrees with them, but who also has to deal with other points of view. This is representative democracy at its best: true interaction between the diverse segments of a community.

Democracy 2000 is prepared to work with citizen groups, government bodies, and individuals who are concerned about better government, more effective representation, and improving local elections. Just contact us.