Electoral Reform Begins at Home

There are four major electoral changes that Orange County voters should consider. Take note everyone, I said ‘consider.' I am not entirely sure what the best approach would be, but I do think the current system doesn't adequately reflect the diversity of viewpoints in Orange County.

For what they are worth, here are four ideas for County electoral reform that have been bandied about:

1. Increasing Membership

The Orange County Commission has been made up of just five commissioners for over one hundred years. Today we are a community of over 118,000 people. Having five commissioners means having one commissioner for every 22,400 residents. By contrast the Town of Chapel Hill has something more like one Town Council member for every 6,000 residents. Carrboro has less than 2,500 residents per Alderman. I think that it is fine and well for the Board of County Commissioners (BOCC) to be a more august body than the Carrboro Board of Aldermen, but it does seem unlikely that any mix of five people could be adequately representative of the 118,000+ or us. Apparently there was a BOCC appointed committee that looked at this issue (as well as others below) and concluded that the BOCC should be expanded to include 7 members. Nothing has happened with that proposal.

2. Non-partisan Elections

This is another interesting idea. Mark Marcoplos used to ask: “What is the Democratic Party's position on landfills?” The point is, of course, that the local issues that come before the BOCC do not usually have that much to do with those issues that are the glue that holds the Democratic Party together (if any). If we had non-partisan elections, perhaps we would have a more open process for electing commissioners. For a fact, the Democratic Primary for BOCC is the election. No non-Democrat has been elected to the BOCC in a long, long time. See other threads for discussion of how long this has been.

On the one hand, this change might make it easier for some right-winger to get elected in Orange County, but on the other this is supposed to be a Democracy. Maybe we would live in a more unified community if the other side had some say in things (even if it was by such a small proportion that they would seldom be able to make an actual impact).

Non-partisan elections would probably cause some voters to self-select out of participating in BOCC elections, because many people will simply not vote in a race about which they know nothing. Currently, such people at least know what political party the candidate belongs to.

3. District Representation

Currently all five Commissioners are elected in countywide elections. No matter where you live in Orange County you get to elect all five Commissioners (as long as you are registered D or U) and those five Commissioners could all come from the same town or even neighborhood. If we had district representation, we would ensure that each member of the Board comes from a different area of the County. There is an active citizen petition circulating on this topic. District representation could work in two different ways:

A) Divide the County into districts and have each district elect its own Commissioner (call this a True District system) or

B) divide the County into districts and have the entire county vote on who represents each district (call this a Ward System).

The Ward System is used in Chatham County and for some seats on the Durham City Council and (I think) the Raleigh City Council. To hear a critique of the Ward System, see section 4 below, Cumulative Voting.

4. Cumulative Voting

Here's a quick explanation of Cumulative Voting from www.fairvote.org :

“In cumulative voting, voters cast as many votes as there are seats. But unlike winner-take-all systems, voters are not limited to giving only one vote to a candidate. Instead, they can put multiple votes on one or more candidates. Voting rights scholar Lani Guinier has promoted cumulative voting as a colorblind means to provide fair minority representation.

“Voters get as many votes as there are people to be elected. Illinois used three-seat districts, so each voter had three votes. Voters could give all of their votes to one candidate, split them up among two or give one vote to each of the three candidates. If there are five people to be elected, voters selecting two candidates would give each candidate 2.5 votes. This allows political minorities to elect someone to office.

“Cumulative voting was used to elect the Illinois state legislature from 1870 to 1980. In recent years it has been used to resolve voting rights cases for city council elections in Amarillo (TX) and Peoria (IL), for county commission elections in Chilton County (AL) and for school board elections in Sisseton (SD) and more than fifty other jurisdictions; in most cases a member from the protected minority was elected following the implementation of cumulative voting. Cumulative voting in 1994 was imposed by a federal judge in a Maryland voting rights case.”

Now first of all, let me point out that “fair minority representation” does not just mean racial minorities. It means any political minority including, for example, Republicans in Orange County. Cumulative Voting, especially combined with expanding the BOCC to 7 members would probably result in better representation of northern Orange County and also result in some more progressive voices from the southern end of the County as well. And it could actually make the BOCC more divisive.

But, voters in northern Orange are currently pretty much completely politically disenfranchised and that does not seem fair to me. While a Ward System would ensure that northern Orange has a representative on the BOCC, it would leave it up to the southern Orange majority to decide who the northern Orange representative is. To over-dramatize it a little, a candidate might run for the northern Orange seat by spending all his/her time campaigning in Chapel Hill and Carrboro. That would not be a very real solution to the problem. In truth, this would be no real change at all from our current system, because right now there are two Commissioners who live in Hillsborough, but who might be said to have “Chapel Hill values.”

On the other hand, in a cumulative voting system, northern Orange voters could concentrate their votes among one or two candidates and manage to win a seat or two. At the same time, there might be other minority interest groups that would gain power in a Cumulative Voting system. Obviously it is hard to argue that African Americans are under-represented on the BOCC at the current time.

Sorry for such a long post, but it is a complex subject that probably deserves even further elaboration than I gave it here. What do you think, OP.org?