In Jack Santucci’s book "More Parties or No Parties," and also in several of his articles, he gamely and quite reasonably tackled a difficult historical question: “Why was STV repealed in two dozen cities in the middle of the 20th century?” As a core part of his answer, he explained his theory behind “vote leakage” and “What relevance does vote leakage have for reform efforts today?”
As someone who has studied, researched and written (in books and articles) about this myself, going back many years, I thought Jack’s “vote leakage” conclusion was an interesting thesis. But ultimately it is unconvincing. I know from personal experience – having been in the trenches of electoral system reform for three decades – that the reason a reform wins or loses is a matter of a number of factors. There is never one reason. Jack’s “vote leakage” addition to previously identified factors – mainstream intolerance of elected minority perspectives, complexities of counting ballots by hand, defeated anti-reformers waiting for the right political moment to repeal, insufficient time for the public to get use to STV (I note that in his table 5.1, of the couple dozen STV cities, nine of them used STV for five years or less, and five more for 12 years or less) – all of these explanations are credible to me, especially in combination with each other in a variety of mixes, depending on the city. And those reasons are not so easy to quantify.
There are several weaknesses in the “vote leakage” argument. Jack tried to tie this to the behavior of political parties in each city. And yet in all of these cities, with the exception of New York City, they were nonpartisan elections. Certainly in nonpartisan elections, political parties still attempt to exert their influence. In San Francisco where I lived for 30 years, and before that in Seattle, which are heavily Democratic cities, the Democratic Party endorsement and slate card mailer is a significant force. But when the voter walked into the voting booth in these STV cities, they did not see party labels on the ballot, they saw only candidate names. While Jack drew a conclusion that the political parties became opposed to STV because they did not see it serving their interests, what about the votes who voted to repeal? What were their reasons?
I’m certain party leaders’ antipathy is to some degree true, but not for the reason that is implied in Jack’s argument. The answer is far simpler: the anti-reformers wait for their chance to repeal. Full stop. And it’s not just political parties that have that attitude, BTW, but also certain business leaders, oftentimes newspaper editors and media personalities, status quo NGOs, stubborn election officials, and a whole host of American curmudgeons who are against change (“That’s not what the Founders intended!”). This attitude has repealed not just STV, but also campaign finance reform, in recent years vote-by-mail reform, early voting, voter ID and more. Because of this attitude, the size of the U.S. House is still stuck at 1910 levels. Many people are afraid of change.
And that’s just political reform, the anti-reformers also have repealed reforms targeted at economic insecurity, or gender parity and much more. There is nothing mysterious or hidden about this dynamic, the anti-reformer attitude has always been with us. It does not only emanate solely from political parties and their disaffections. And it did not just manifest with STV in a handful of cities. It is everywhere, all the time. It is the ground on which political reformers walk.
Certainly, in my experience, the dominant political parties – both Democrats and Republicans -- are inherently conservative organizations. They generally like the rules that elected them, especially true of the individual incumbent legislators, who of course their votes you need to pass or protect your reform. Which raises another possible explanation for the repeal of STV that Jack’s book did not adequately deal with: according to Kathleen Barber and others, STV broke up political machines in most of these cities. And that led to unremitting hostility from the old guard that has lost its dominance. Under this alternative thesis, it's not just a matter of "vote leakage" in which party leaders saw some voters give their lower rankings to candidates not to their liking (such as candidates from another party). It's more that these political leaders lost real political power, and they waited for their chance to repeal, and fanned other factors -- racial intolerance, Red Scare, perceived complication of a new system of ranked ballots, perceived complexity of hand counts, the reasons varied from city to city -- to push repeal. Compared to those very real dynamics that involve very human factors and motivations, i.e. craving for (return to) power, everyday voters’ simplistic understanding of politics, and more, "vote leakage" feels like a pretty thin reed upon which to rest the case for all those repeals.
Jack has written that his thesis of vote leakage is the one that best fit the "patterns in the data" – but his data was very limited. No one knows what the leaders of repeal thought in the various cities, why they thought it was so urgent to repeal. There are no interviews with these leaders, no diaries of their thoughts that we know of, though there are a few observations and comments from various quarters. But nothing definitive. We have no polls or focus groups from that time period, asking the public its views, teasing out subtleties of opinion – was STV just too complicated? Were the long hand counts a downer? Was the old guard striking back against any and all reform? If so, those explanations undermine Jack’s exclusive thesis about STV being repealed because of dissatisfaction among party leaders over inability to control their voters' votes. If the voters had been greatly satisfied with STV, it would not have mattered what the party leaders thought or did. I think we have to be careful not to draw too strong of a conclusion from such a limited data perspective that Jack presents in his book.
Certainly there's some interesting and suggestive evidence in his data, and some amusing anecdotal observations. I would love to have read more stories from those eras in Jack’s book. Such a colorful time and cast of characters. More of the "who said/did what" type of history would have been fascinating, as well as I suspect illuminating. But we don’t get much of that from Jack’s book, and the evidence he does present does not seem conclusive. There are too many alternative explanations for repeal that he would have to eliminate as influential, one by one, in order to raise the profile of his "vote leakage" theory. Look at the list that I mentioned in my second paragraph. Jack did not really address any of those other possible reasons for repeal in his book. I was surprised at how little he addressed Kathy Barber's thesis, which in my reading of her book was quite strong.
Which is fine, that wasn't Jack’s focus. But it does illustrate the narrowness of his focus as a limitation. As I wrote above, there is never ONE reason for repeal (unless there is some scandal that happened, like in San Francisco when Harvey Milk and Mayor George Moscone were assassinated and in a bizarre narrative twist, the assassinations were blamed on district elections). Jack has certainly added something interesting to the discourse of "what happened" so many years ago. But at least in my view, his research and data does not settle this question of why all these repeals happened.
And to the extent that I accept vote leakage as a real phenomenon, I don't see it being such a significant factor that it is very relevant to the election system reform movement today. Yes, the political parties are often opposed to this kind of structural change. No one knows that better than Rob Richie and I. We knew that before Jack’s book was published, because we have been fighting Democrat and Republican obstructionism for decades. That's nothing new.
In addition, when you approach this from another angle, one person’s “vote leakage” is another person’s "coalition building" and what others call "voter choice." Of course there is going to be vote leakage, as Jack has defined it, in STV elections. That's SUPPOSED to happen. That's a feature, not a bug. To Jack and others, these apparently are negatives. To me and many others, these are positives.
In short, Jack took some rather interesting research that he conducted, admirably churning thru old election records and such, and has shoehorned this data into a questionable thesis that he (and others) have used to graft this data onto a defense of the importance of political parties in the modern day. I don’t see the connection as strongly as Jack and others do. I don’t think he/they have sufficiently made their case. And besides – who exactly are they arguing against, or trying to disprove? Does any serious person actually think political parties should go away, or be abolished? Or are not still extremely powerful and fundamental organizations in the US political system? This strikes me as being a bit of a strawman argument.
Certainly Jack’s book has found its audience among some enthusiasts, and as a fellow author I congratulate him. As myself and others have said, it’s a big country and there’s room for trying different PR methods. As someone who ran the first STV campaign in the US in decades in the 1996 campaign in San Francisco (we lost, 44-56%), and who ran other successful campaigns for RCV/IRV in various cities, I would personally welcome any passage and implementation of a Party List PR system (open or closed), anywhere in the United States.
In the first 5 years of FairVote’s existence, from 1992 to 1997, Rob Richie and I wrote almost exclusively about List methods in a generic way to explain the concept of proportionality to an unlearned US audience, just as Lee Drutman and others are doing now. We found that most (though not all) Americans, including most political elites, were not much interested in party-based electoral methods or furthering empowering party bosses. In the meantime, ranked ballot methods like IRV solved real problems, especially in cities with non-partisan elections (which is most of the US), such as getting rid of unnecessary, expensive and disempowering two-round runoff elections or primary elections. That’s what found success, and we pursued it. If we had not done so, none of us would even be having this conversation today. Those early victories for single-winner RCV/IRV are what launched the current movement for electoral system reform, and have sparked increased interest in PR.
So I truly hope the proponents of List systems find success. Toward that success, I hope Americans have changed their attitudes since the 1990s and gotten over their phobia about parties. Here's my advice: I may be wrong, but I am pretty certain that complex arguments about vote leakage will not help you as you try to convince the public to try out your party-based reform. The public has its own gut understanding of these matters. You either tap into what they know in their gut, or you will lose. The first question to ask yourself is: “What problem are you trying to solve?” that Party List is the unique solution for that will resonate with the public? The answer will not be found, I don't imagine, in complicated political science explanations.
The most elementary reform we could execute by 2026 is formalizing our defacto three-party system.
Far Right party stands for nationalism/authoritarian regime aka MAGA/POT (Party of Trump). This party claims everyone to their left is far-left socialist libtards.
Far Left party stands for elements of socialism aka Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) or the (former) Socialist Party of America. There are a few good examples of districts that are well served by this party.
That for now leaves the Democratic Party. Democrats should own up to DSA that they should run as their own party. Assure only Democrats run under the Democratic party banner. Institute primary instead of caucus fights for nominations to help ensure right-fit candidates in their progressive, centrist or conservative districts.
For an electorate that currently feels disenfranchised from "both parties" and party membership is resultingly low and skewed to extremes, this simple reform will make it much easier for voters to make clear choices. This needs to be done before the midterms.
In Jack Santucci’s book "More Parties or No Parties," and also in several of his articles, he gamely and quite reasonably tackled a difficult historical question: “Why was STV repealed in two dozen cities in the middle of the 20th century?” As a core part of his answer, he explained his theory behind “vote leakage” and “What relevance does vote leakage have for reform efforts today?”
As someone who has studied, researched and written (in books and articles) about this myself, going back many years, I thought Jack’s “vote leakage” conclusion was an interesting thesis. But ultimately it is unconvincing. I know from personal experience – having been in the trenches of electoral system reform for three decades – that the reason a reform wins or loses is a matter of a number of factors. There is never one reason. Jack’s “vote leakage” addition to previously identified factors – mainstream intolerance of elected minority perspectives, complexities of counting ballots by hand, defeated anti-reformers waiting for the right political moment to repeal, insufficient time for the public to get use to STV (I note that in his table 5.1, of the couple dozen STV cities, nine of them used STV for five years or less, and five more for 12 years or less) – all of these explanations are credible to me, especially in combination with each other in a variety of mixes, depending on the city. And those reasons are not so easy to quantify.
There are several weaknesses in the “vote leakage” argument. Jack tried to tie this to the behavior of political parties in each city. And yet in all of these cities, with the exception of New York City, they were nonpartisan elections. Certainly in nonpartisan elections, political parties still attempt to exert their influence. In San Francisco where I lived for 30 years, and before that in Seattle, which are heavily Democratic cities, the Democratic Party endorsement and slate card mailer is a significant force. But when the voter walked into the voting booth in these STV cities, they did not see party labels on the ballot, they saw only candidate names. While Jack drew a conclusion that the political parties became opposed to STV because they did not see it serving their interests, what about the votes who voted to repeal? What were their reasons?
I’m certain party leaders’ antipathy is to some degree true, but not for the reason that is implied in Jack’s argument. The answer is far simpler: the anti-reformers wait for their chance to repeal. Full stop. And it’s not just political parties that have that attitude, BTW, but also certain business leaders, oftentimes newspaper editors and media personalities, status quo NGOs, stubborn election officials, and a whole host of American curmudgeons who are against change (“That’s not what the Founders intended!”). This attitude has repealed not just STV, but also campaign finance reform, in recent years vote-by-mail reform, early voting, voter ID and more. Because of this attitude, the size of the U.S. House is still stuck at 1910 levels. Many people are afraid of change.
And that’s just political reform, the anti-reformers also have repealed reforms targeted at economic insecurity, or gender parity and much more. There is nothing mysterious or hidden about this dynamic, the anti-reformer attitude has always been with us. It does not only emanate solely from political parties and their disaffections. And it did not just manifest with STV in a handful of cities. It is everywhere, all the time. It is the ground on which political reformers walk.
Certainly, in my experience, the dominant political parties – both Democrats and Republicans -- are inherently conservative organizations. They generally like the rules that elected them, especially true of the individual incumbent legislators, who of course their votes you need to pass or protect your reform. Which raises another possible explanation for the repeal of STV that Jack’s book did not adequately deal with: according to Kathleen Barber and others, STV broke up political machines in most of these cities. And that led to unremitting hostility from the old guard that has lost its dominance. Under this alternative thesis, it's not just a matter of "vote leakage" in which party leaders saw some voters give their lower rankings to candidates not to their liking (such as candidates from another party). It's more that these political leaders lost real political power, and they waited for their chance to repeal, and fanned other factors -- racial intolerance, Red Scare, perceived complication of a new system of ranked ballots, perceived complexity of hand counts, the reasons varied from city to city -- to push repeal. Compared to those very real dynamics that involve very human factors and motivations, i.e. craving for (return to) power, everyday voters’ simplistic understanding of politics, and more, "vote leakage" feels like a pretty thin reed upon which to rest the case for all those repeals.
Jack has written that his thesis of vote leakage is the one that best fit the "patterns in the data" – but his data was very limited. No one knows what the leaders of repeal thought in the various cities, why they thought it was so urgent to repeal. There are no interviews with these leaders, no diaries of their thoughts that we know of, though there are a few observations and comments from various quarters. But nothing definitive. We have no polls or focus groups from that time period, asking the public its views, teasing out subtleties of opinion – was STV just too complicated? Were the long hand counts a downer? Was the old guard striking back against any and all reform? If so, those explanations undermine Jack’s exclusive thesis about STV being repealed because of dissatisfaction among party leaders over inability to control their voters' votes. If the voters had been greatly satisfied with STV, it would not have mattered what the party leaders thought or did. I think we have to be careful not to draw too strong of a conclusion from such a limited data perspective that Jack presents in his book.
Certainly there's some interesting and suggestive evidence in his data, and some amusing anecdotal observations. I would love to have read more stories from those eras in Jack’s book. Such a colorful time and cast of characters. More of the "who said/did what" type of history would have been fascinating, as well as I suspect illuminating. But we don’t get much of that from Jack’s book, and the evidence he does present does not seem conclusive. There are too many alternative explanations for repeal that he would have to eliminate as influential, one by one, in order to raise the profile of his "vote leakage" theory. Look at the list that I mentioned in my second paragraph. Jack did not really address any of those other possible reasons for repeal in his book. I was surprised at how little he addressed Kathy Barber's thesis, which in my reading of her book was quite strong.
Which is fine, that wasn't Jack’s focus. But it does illustrate the narrowness of his focus as a limitation. As I wrote above, there is never ONE reason for repeal (unless there is some scandal that happened, like in San Francisco when Harvey Milk and Mayor George Moscone were assassinated and in a bizarre narrative twist, the assassinations were blamed on district elections). Jack has certainly added something interesting to the discourse of "what happened" so many years ago. But at least in my view, his research and data does not settle this question of why all these repeals happened.
And to the extent that I accept vote leakage as a real phenomenon, I don't see it being such a significant factor that it is very relevant to the election system reform movement today. Yes, the political parties are often opposed to this kind of structural change. No one knows that better than Rob Richie and I. We knew that before Jack’s book was published, because we have been fighting Democrat and Republican obstructionism for decades. That's nothing new.
In addition, when you approach this from another angle, one person’s “vote leakage” is another person’s "coalition building" and what others call "voter choice." Of course there is going to be vote leakage, as Jack has defined it, in STV elections. That's SUPPOSED to happen. That's a feature, not a bug. To Jack and others, these apparently are negatives. To me and many others, these are positives.
In short, Jack took some rather interesting research that he conducted, admirably churning thru old election records and such, and has shoehorned this data into a questionable thesis that he (and others) have used to graft this data onto a defense of the importance of political parties in the modern day. I don’t see the connection as strongly as Jack and others do. I don’t think he/they have sufficiently made their case. And besides – who exactly are they arguing against, or trying to disprove? Does any serious person actually think political parties should go away, or be abolished? Or are not still extremely powerful and fundamental organizations in the US political system? This strikes me as being a bit of a strawman argument.
Certainly Jack’s book has found its audience among some enthusiasts, and as a fellow author I congratulate him. As myself and others have said, it’s a big country and there’s room for trying different PR methods. As someone who ran the first STV campaign in the US in decades in the 1996 campaign in San Francisco (we lost, 44-56%), and who ran other successful campaigns for RCV/IRV in various cities, I would personally welcome any passage and implementation of a Party List PR system (open or closed), anywhere in the United States.
The Substack window cut off this part:
In the first 5 years of FairVote’s existence, from 1992 to 1997, Rob Richie and I wrote almost exclusively about List methods in a generic way to explain the concept of proportionality to an unlearned US audience, just as Lee Drutman and others are doing now. We found that most (though not all) Americans, including most political elites, were not much interested in party-based electoral methods or furthering empowering party bosses. In the meantime, ranked ballot methods like IRV solved real problems, especially in cities with non-partisan elections (which is most of the US), such as getting rid of unnecessary, expensive and disempowering two-round runoff elections or primary elections. That’s what found success, and we pursued it. If we had not done so, none of us would even be having this conversation today. Those early victories for single-winner RCV/IRV are what launched the current movement for electoral system reform, and have sparked increased interest in PR.
So I truly hope the proponents of List systems find success. Toward that success, I hope Americans have changed their attitudes since the 1990s and gotten over their phobia about parties. Here's my advice: I may be wrong, but I am pretty certain that complex arguments about vote leakage will not help you as you try to convince the public to try out your party-based reform. The public has its own gut understanding of these matters. You either tap into what they know in their gut, or you will lose. The first question to ask yourself is: “What problem are you trying to solve?” that Party List is the unique solution for that will resonate with the public? The answer will not be found, I don't imagine, in complicated political science explanations.
Superb explanation of history that may illuminate a way forward. Thank you Ben!
Thoughtful, informative, and clear-eyed. Thank you.
Has anyone thought of using rank choice voting. It works, and I found it to be very fair.
The most elementary reform we could execute by 2026 is formalizing our defacto three-party system.
Far Right party stands for nationalism/authoritarian regime aka MAGA/POT (Party of Trump). This party claims everyone to their left is far-left socialist libtards.
Far Left party stands for elements of socialism aka Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) or the (former) Socialist Party of America. There are a few good examples of districts that are well served by this party.
That for now leaves the Democratic Party. Democrats should own up to DSA that they should run as their own party. Assure only Democrats run under the Democratic party banner. Institute primary instead of caucus fights for nominations to help ensure right-fit candidates in their progressive, centrist or conservative districts.
For an electorate that currently feels disenfranchised from "both parties" and party membership is resultingly low and skewed to extremes, this simple reform will make it much easier for voters to make clear choices. This needs to be done before the midterms.