Limited Vote Essay ⋆ Political Science Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

City council members in the United States until the late nineteenth century were elected by a single-member or multimember ward plurality electoral system that facilitated boss and machine control. Reformers were disturbed by control of all council seats by one political party and commenced to advocate alternative electoral systems.

A number of city charters were amended to provide for an at-large or multimember election wherein voters are limited to casting fewer ballots than the number of contested seats. This system, currently used only in the United States, guarantees direct representation for members of the largest party or group with the representation dependent on the size of the council and the number of candidates for whom a voter may cast a ballot. Each vote for a candidate carries an equal weight, and a voter by casting additional votes may contribute to the defeat of the favorite candidate. Hence, the system encourages bullet or single-shot voting—voting for only one candidate.

The system was used by New York City commencing in 1963 to elect two members in each borough and resulted in one Democrat and one Republican elected until 1969 when three Liberals were elected to replace Republicans. Because the boroughs differ in population, the city abandoned the system following the U.S. Supreme Court’s one-person, one vote dictum in Reynolds v. Sims (1964) and Wesberry v. Sanders (1964). Nevertheless, the system currently is employed in several southern local governments. As of early 2010, the system was used in several Connecticut municipalities, several Pennsylvania counties, one county (Beaufort) in North Carolina, and twenty-one towns in Alabama.

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