July 16, 2004
(Updated) Some History Of Commission Government
A Little Background For The Curious
Note: This post has been updated. Any and all updates appear at the end of the original post.
As a follow-up of sorts to the earlier item defending Portland's commission form of government, we thought it might be helpful to dig up some other historical information. Coincidentally, yesterday we happened to reach the section of E. Kimbark MacColl's The Shaping of a City in which he discusses the adoption of commission government by Portland in 1913:
The Galveston Plan called for the replacement of part time councilmen with four full time commissioners, each assigned a major department of city government, usually the police. The commissioners ans the mayor held equal votes in legislative matters; the veto was abolished. District or ward representation was also abolished, with each commissioner elected city wide by following a system of preferential voting. City elections were no longer conducted on a partisan basis. The preferential system provided for first, second and third choices. A candidates receiving a majority of first choices would win. If no majority was achieved, the second choice votes would be added and then the third choices if necessary. One of the purposes of this system was to eliminate the need for run-off elections. With the Galveston Plan, the mayor and commissioners assumed both legislative and administrative responsibilties. ...
We've mentioned this preference voting before -- today, it's more commonly referred to as instant runoff voting. In 1932, voters approved a measure to abolish the preferential system, by a vote of 78,911 to 18,461. If the City were to make any changes to its commission government, it should be to restore the original system of preference voting at least for the primary election.
Moving along, readers will note that the above MacColl excerpt refers to the commission form of government as the Galveston Plan. Why? Because it was devised in 1901 by Galveston, Texas, in the aftermath of a natural disaster.
If you want a little further reading, the U.S. Conference of Mayors offers a historical overview of the development of local government forms in the United States. We also ran across a research paper (pdf) on Portland and commission government.
Update
Actually, it occurs to us that our love of instant runoff voting perhaps caused us to jump the gun here. Given that we opposed the recently-adopted measure to abolish the general election runoff in cases where one candidate received a majority in the primary election, why would we support a preference voting system for the primary, which would inevitably guarantee the lack of a general election no matter what?
So it's trickier than it at first seemed. One possibiltiy is to do away with the primary election altogether, and simply have a single election in November which utilizes preference voting. On the other hand, since we now have a system in which the majority candidate in the primary is declared to be the outright winner without having a general election afterwards, we could institute preference voting during the primary anyway, in which case while it would guarantee that someone always achieves a majority (whether it be in the first, secod, or third counts), more voter opinion would be communicated through the ballots, since people could first choose their choice of conscience, and then choose the choice for which they could settle.
At any rate, it's more complicated than our above statement suggested. But we still believe there's potentially a place for preference voting in our elections. It's just a matter of determining where it makes the most sense and has the most impact.
Comments (3)
Rob Richie on 17 Jul 2004
On the possible adoption of instant runoff votng: I would agree that instant runoff voting would make sense for the points you make here. One clarification on the old preferential voting system used in the early 1900's: that system resulted in people's second and third choices potentially counting against the chances of their first choices. In the later rounds, a voter's ballot would count simultaneously for their first, second and third choices.
With instant runoff voting as known today (www.fairvote.org/irv), people have one vote count in every round of counting. If a voter's first choice is a strong candidate, that voter's ballot keeps counting for his or her first choice -- just as that voter would want it. If a voter's first choice is a weak candidate who gets eliminated, then that voter's ballot counts for his or her second choice.
This little change in the system can make it much better -- with instant ruinoff voting voters can rank candidates in order of choice, free of any calculations that might cause them to rank only one candidate in the old preferential system.
Chris Smith on 17 Jul 2004
I'm a fan of instant runoff, but believe it will have a much more powerful impact in partisan elections, where it would give 3rd parties a more viable role in the debate.
The potential downside is what we saw in our recent 23-candidate mayoral primary. You never really got to see the front runners in a head-to-head discussion of policy.
Mark on 18 Jul 2004
you should check out electionmethods.org if you haven't already done so.