Cumulative Voting

An alternative election system that improves minority groups' chances of obtaining a greater share of seats in a legislative body is called cumulative voting. The system works only in multimember districts where each voter has more than one vote.

In conventional voting, a nine-member county council, for example, may have six seats elected by district and three seats elected at-large by all the county voters. If a minority group makes up one-third of the county population but is clustered in one district, it has little chance of electing any of the council candidates running countywide on a winner-take-all basis. Assuming the group succeeds in electing one of its own in the district where it is a majority, it would still be two seats shy of the three seats needed to equal its one-third share of the county population.

In cumulative voting, however, all nine seats might be filled at-large. Each voter would have nine votes to distribute among the candidates or to concentrate on one or a few. The nine top vote getters would be the winners. If the minority group put up several candidates and concentrated its votes on them it would have a good chance of electing two or more, thereby gaining partial or full proportional representation on the council. This strategy is similar to bullet voting, in which a voter entitled to vote for several candidates instead votes only for one, depriving the other candidates of votes they might have received.

Under federal law, cumulative voting is not possible for congressional elections. Each member of the House of Representatives is elected from a single district. The only at-large voting for House members takes place in the seven states that are entitled to only one seat because of their low populations. Even in those states, each voter may vote for only one candidate for representative. (See House of Representatives, electing.)

Cumulative voting has been used in state and local elections, however, and some reformers advocate a law change to permit its use in congressional elections. A 1993 racial redistricting case in North Carolina drew renewed attention to the cumulative voting concept as an alternative to the drawing of majority-minority districts to ensure minority representation. The Supreme Court ruling in Shaw v. Reno reinstated a challenge to the two North Carolina districts, but the dispute was resolved without any effort in Congress to allow cumulative voting. As one of fourteen states required by the Voting Rights Act to obtain federal approval of election law changes, North Carolina had created the oddly shaped majority-minority districts in an attempt to satisfy the Justice Department.

Also in 1993 the writings of law professor Lani Guinier in favor of cumulative voting helped to kill her nomination by President Bill Clinton to head the Justice Department Civil Rights Division. The incident demonstrated that the idea of cumulative voting has the potential to be explosively controversial. Opponents contend that it violates the Supreme Court's one-person, one-vote standard and in effect imposes quotas for membership in legislatures. Nevertheless, it has been used by dozens of local jurisdictions, often resulting in the election of minority candidates to previously all-white county commissions, city councils, and school boards.

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