Paul Bass Photo
With the help of a spare cardboard box and some higher-order math, one neighborhood tested a new way of choosing candidates — when the choice is between more than two.
The test took place in the Edgewood School cafeteria Tuesday night. Members of the Democratic committee in Westville’s Ward 25 — often the city’s highest-voting district — gathered to endorse a candidate for mayor in a new way. All 30 ward committees around town are holding these straw polls this week and next, usually a quick, straightforward process. Then each ward’s two co-chairs go to a city convention to cast votes for the town committee’s official mayoral endorsement.
Since a divisive 2011 election, Ward 25 has worked to unite the neighborhood by trying to include all factions in decisions, inviting everyone to participate, and conducting business in the open. A few months ago, members noticed that almost all seven of the original 2013 Democratic mayoral candidates had visible support in the neighborhood. Members decided they didn’t want to make an endorsement based on the wishes of a minority of the committee. Neighbor Scott McLean, a Quinnipiac University political scientist, offered a solution: Imitate Portland, Maine; Oakland, Calif.; and the Australian House of Representatives. Try “instant run-off voting” or “IRV.”
That means having people fill out a ballot by ranking the candidates in their order of preference. Then ballot-counters tally up people’s first choices in a first round. If no candidate wins an outright majority, the candidate with the least first-choice votes is eliminated. Then ballot-counters start a second round. They examine the votes of people who had voted for that losing candidate; the ballot-counters look at those people’s second choices, then add those second-choice votes to the other candidates’ first-choice vote totals. That process continues until a candidate gets a clear majority of the vote.
The idea: You vote for people you actually want, rather than strategically voting for the lesser of evils. And no candidate wins simply because two other candidates split a majority of votes.
Ward co-chairs Janis Underwood and Mike Slattery (pictured at the top of the story) agreed to abide by the ward’s wishes at the town committee convention. They agreed to vote in the first round for the winner of the IRV poll — even though Slattery is publicly supporting Justin Elicker for mayor. (Underwood has not declared support for a candidate.) “I was really concerned by how the committee was going to express itself. I really wanted to hear what the ward was thinking” and reach consensus, he said.
In advance of the candidate-selection vote, the ward committee also organized a lively May 20 mayoral debate in the neighborhood so people could hear all candidates at once.
Then members met in June for a dry run to practice IRV in a mock election — for food rather than for candidates. IRV turned out more complicated than it sounds. Members had everyone vote for their favorite dinner entree; seven choices appeared on the menu (as on the then-mayoral menu). No clear winner emerged intitially. It took five rounds for beef to edge out “vegan” to win. The committee also voted for three forms of creamer (see tally sheet at the top of the story) to practice for choosing among the three candidates for city/town clerk. The practice round also taught organizers that manually counting and recounting the ballots in one pile got too confusing. So in preparation for the real vote this Tuesday night, Slattery brought in the box from a recently-purchased Ikea bedside table to use as a grid on which to place multiple piles of ballots to be recounted in multiple rounds.
Thirty-eight of the ward committee’s 46 members gathered around elementary-school-scale lunch tables to listen to a refresher before voting.
They also watched this three-minute Youtube video that explains IRV. Somehow the cartoon characters made it sound simpler.
Then members wrote down all their choices for mayor and city/town clerk, passed by list-checker Laurel Underwood-Price …
… and dropped their ballots in an old-fashioned ballot box.
Westville’s unofficial mayor, Gabe DaSilva, tabulated the clerk race results …
… and found that no one had a clear majority. Sergio Rodriguez (who lives in upper Westville’s neighborhood Ward 26) had the most votes, 16, but only two more than Mike Smart, and less than half of the 36 votes cast for all candidates. (Two people voted for no one, who didn’t count.) On to round two. Ron Smith, who received the fewest votes, was eliminated, his voters’ second choices added to the other candidates’ totals. It turned five out of his six voters had picked Rodriguez as their second choice. That put Rodriguez comfortably over the top with 21 votes, a clear majority. If Smart had been Smith’s voters’ second choice, then he would have won the nod.
On to the main event. Professor McLean and City Hall staffer Rebecca Bombero re-examined the piles in Slattery’s IKEA box to focus on the mayoral results.
The results: Twenty votes for state Sen. Toni Harp. Ten for Alderman Justin Elicker. Five for former city economic development chief Henry Fernandez. Two for Hillhouse Principal Kermit Carolina. One for plumber Sundiata Keitazulu. No need for a second round: Harp had pulled out a clear majority.
That came as an anticlimax to some of those assembled — not because of their feelings toward any of the candidates, but because the idea of multiple rounds sounded kind of … fun. “We really enjoy democracy in this ward. We really enjoy voting and the whole process,” said Jessica Feinleib (pictured with state Rep. Pat Dillon).
“Mike and I will now go to the town committee and cast your votes as you have indicated,” Underwood announced. To which Slattery added: “Thank you. That was fun.”
The same night, the Democratic committee in another high-voting district, Morris Cove’s Ward 18, made its endorsement. State Sen. Martin Looney called for a voice vote. It went unaninmously for Toni Harp.
Demcoratic Town Chairwoman Jackie James said no other ward committee is trying out IRV this year. But she said change is in the air. She said the town committee has formed a working group to look at amending its bylaws for the first time in decades. Including rules for how ward committees endorse candidates. “We’re going to consider all possibilities,” she said. “We want the process to be transparent and inclusive of everyone.”