Imagine if Congress was elected by Proportional Representation

Illinois’ 110-yr history with a form of PR resulted in more voter choice, more bipartisanship, less bitter polarization and better representation—a lesson for our times

Welcome to DemocracySOS, a newsletter detailing the failings of America’s “winner take all” democracy, as well as proposed reforms and solutions. If you like this issue of DemocracySOS, please consider becoming a paying subscriber to support this work. Or if you are a paying subscriber, give a gift subscription to a friend, colleague or family member. ‘Tis the season for giving.

And now, let’s dive in.

A number of US cities and towns—from New York City, Cincinnati and Cleveland to Chilton County AL and a number of counties in Pennsylvania—have had a history of electing their city councils or county governments by one of several proportional representation electoral methods. But only one US state has ever used a proportional method to elect its state legislature. That’s the state of Illinois.

For 110 years until 1980, Illinois used a method called cumulative voting to elect its state House of Representatives. Instead of single-seat "winner take all" districts, in which legislators were elected one district at a time, cumulative voting in Illinois used three-seat districts, and a candidate needed only 25% of the popular vote to win one of the three seats. Cumulative voting, which is known as a “semi-proportional” voting method, is designed to foster broad representation, more voter choice and less bitter partisanship. Illinois’ experience with this method has a lot to teach us about how to address the severe crisis of American democracy.

***************************

Fortunately when I worked for the Center for Voting and Democracy (now known as FairVote), we conducted a project interviewing a number of former Illinois state legislators who had been elected by cumulative voting. We intended to make a documentary but our ambitions were bigger than our budget, so the documentary never happened.

But myself and a couple of others poured through the hours and hours of raw video footage, and what we heard was illuminating. Some of these state legislators went on to become members of Congress, US Senators, federal judges and law professors. Among the list were well known names like US Senators Paul Simon and Carol Mosely Braun (the first black woman elected to the Senate), US representatives Abner Mikva, John Porter and more.

But before many of them found political fame in higher office, first they all had been elected to the Illinois House of Representatives by cumulative voting. Below are excerpts from the transcripts of these interviews, presenting some of the insights from these savvy leaders about the impacts of cumulative voting and how it improved representation, increased bipartisanship and reduced bitter partisan warfare between Democrats and Republicans.

When we conducted the interviews, many of the former legislators were then elder statesmen and stateswomen, most of them retired, so with fewer political axes left to grind. It was a joy to listen to their illuminating reminiscences. What these former legislators had to say about Illinois’s use of this system speaks directly to our national dilemmas regarding toxic partisan polarization, declining voter interest, low competition, poor representation, and a loss of political ideas.

Indeed, as a result of using cumulative voting in three-seat districts, Illinois enjoyed bipartisan representation from all parts of the state, including frequent sightings of now extinct species – Chicago Republicans, as well as downstate Democrats, all of them elected, as if by some kind of democratic magic, in strongholds of the opposing party.

Here are some excerpts from these revealing interviews, grouped by major themes.(Note: while cumulative voting technically is a semi-proportional representation method, in Illinois it was often known simply as ‘proportional representation’)

BIPARTISAN REPRESENTATION IN ALL PARTS OF THE STATE; LESS URBAN/SUBURBAN SPLIT

Congressman Abner Mikva, Democrat: “Proportional representation gave a voice to a critical minority so that Democrats in the [heavily GOP] suburbs had a spokesperson from their district who they could rally around and generate some party activities. Similarly, in Chicago you had Republican representatives and these Republican outposts in a city that was dominated by the Democratic Party.”

Lee Daniels, Republican, former Speaker of the House in Illinois:  “I thought proportional representation worked well. I thought it gave a guarantee of minority representation. In the Republican caucus, frequently we had Republican legislators talking about the needs of the city of Chicago. Today, generally speaking, there are very few [elected] Republicans that come from the city of Chicago so that the views of the city are very difficult to be communicated within our [party] caucus.”

Daniels, who served in the state legislature for thirty years, was elected under both a three-seat PR system and a single-seat, winner-take-all system, and speaks with great conviction about the advantages of proportional representation.

Congressman John Porter, Republican: “I thought it led to a much more independent and cooperative body that was not divided along party lines and run by a few leaders on each side. And it allowed individual legislators to work with members on both sides of the aisle in, I think, a very collegial atmosphere.”

Harold Katz, Democrat, former representative from the Chicago north suburb of Glencoe, a heavily GOP area: “The House [under proportional representation] was a very exciting place. It seemed to be the center of activity in the state capital. It was like a symphony, really, with not just two instruments playing, but a number of different instruments going at all times.”

Congressman Mikva, Democrat: “Between us we represented just about every organized point of view within the district. And that’s something that you can’t do with just one representative. If you represent the Democrats, the Republicans will feel voiceless; or you represent the organization, then the independents will feel voiceless. Or represent the conservatives, and the moderates will feel voiceless. Whereas with this multimember district, and particularly with proportional representation, it made it possible to give a legitimacy to the delegation that you don’t have with single-member districts.”

What these former state legislators experienced with proportional representation is that nearly every Illinois three-seat district benefitted from two-party representation. Both parties won seats in all parts of the state. As a result, Republicans didn’t ignore cities, and Democrats didn’t ignore Republican strongholds. Illinois was not carved up into a balkanized red and blue partisan checkerboard.

In fact, for many years the Speaker of the House was a Democrat elected from heavily GOP DuPage County. When you only need 25 percent of the vote in a three-seat district to win a seat, Democrats in conservative areas and Republicans in liberal areas could win one of those seats. Congressman Porter was so impressed by his experience of PR in Illinois’s state government that he began working with other members of Congress to bring proportional representation to elections for the federal House of Representatives.

MORE CIVILITY and REDUCED POLARIZATION

Both Republicans and Democrats saw other advantages to cumulative voting that addressed the dilemma of partisan bitterness, polarization and regional balkanization.

Giddy Dyer, Republican, female state legislator: ““I think the lack of civility began when we did away with [proportional representation] and the multimember districts. Because now, it’s just like two armies in full regalia fighting each other. There’s just total squashing of many good ideas.”

Congressman Porter, Republican: “By its nature the system encouraged moderate viewpoints to be brought to bear. There’s a great deal more independence for each member than there is under the present system.”

Congressman Mikva, Democrat from Chicago: “This idea of balkanizing the state that way, it’s not healthy. [Proportional representation], I think, helped us synthesize some of these differences, made us realize even though we were different than the downstaters, different than the suburbanites, that we also had a lot in common that held us together as a single state.”

Congressman Porter, Republican: In Illinois’s three-seat districts with PR, “we operated in a less partisan environment because both parties represented the entire state.”

Giddy Dyer, Republican state legislator:  “I get back to the reason it’s so important to have some Republican representatives from the city of Chicago is that they, many of them, had children in the Chicago public schools, and rode the CTA [metro transit system], and cared about Chicago’s problems. And now, it seems to be polarized, between the city, the suburban ring, and downstate.”

IDEOLOGICAL DIVERSITY WITHIN THE PARTIES — INDEPENDENT CANDIDATES BEAT THE PARTY MACHINES

Illinois’ experience showed that cumulative voting allowed for a broader spectrum of representatives, not only bipartisan but also within each party. A liberal three-seat district would elect two Democrats and one Republican, but the two Democrats often would be two different types of Democrats—a liberal Democrat and a moderate Democrat, or an independent Democrat and a machine Democrat.

It was the same with the Republicans. Voters all over the state, whether Democrats, Republicans, or independents, had a vote that counted for something. Judge Abner Mikva was an independent Democrat who ran against the Democratic Party machine in Chicago. He said that under proportional representation, because a candidate needed to win only 25% of the popular vote, legislators were not so beholden to monied interests and political machines. You could run independent of the political machine.

Congressman Mikva, Democrat: “Proportional representation gave the opportunity for outsiders like me to win a seat. I never could have gotten elected if the party could have simply beat me one-on-one. I didn’t have a lot of money.”

Giddy Dyer, GOP state legislator, who had to fight her own party’s machine to get elected:  “My county chairman was from the other branch, the right-wing branch of the Republican Party, and I would never have been, quote, asked to run by that county chairman. So when I decided to run, I really had to form my own campaign committee and not depend on the party for any help…And Gene Hoffman in the neighboring district was in the same situation. He was a schoolteacher, and very strong on education, and from the moderate wing of the party, and he had to build his own organization to run.”

In Judge Mikva’s Chicago district, one Democrat represented the Daley machine, Mikva represented a more independent Democratic perspective, and the dean of the John Marshall Law School was the elected Republican.

Congressman Mikva, Democrat: “You ended up with more independent people in the legislature. They weren’t that responsible to a particular political party. Paul Powell couldn’t dominate all of the downstate Democrats because Paul Simon could get elected thanks to proportional representation. Richard Daley couldn’t command all of the Cook County Democrats because Tony Scariano, Bob Mann, and others got elected…The representatives in both parties had a lot more freedom. Everybody understood that you didn’t have to toe a particular party line, or you didn’t have to kowtow to a particular leader. So it generated a lot more independence within the legislature…it really gave the local, legitimate parochial concerns better presence and better voice than they have now.”

Because a candidate only needed support from 25% of the voters in a three-seat district, this had campaign finance implications. Independent candidates could run and win without a lot of money or the backing of the party machine. A candidate could run a grassroot campaign on a shoestring budget.

Congressman Mikva: “You could appeal to a much smaller set of voters. That involves a much smaller amount of money being spent on them…advertising, media, so on.”

Campaign finance reformers should take note that grassroots candidates were able to win because money played a much-reduced role since a winning candidate only needed to reach the 25% victory threshold.

BETTER FOR WOMEN AND MINORITIES

Proportional representation didn’t serve only political minorities like Republicans in liberal areas and Democrats in conservative areas. It also helped women and racial minorities win representation.

Emil Jones, black Democratic president of the state senate: “The district I was elected from was a district that comprised only about 20 percent of African American constituencies. So, what I did was I organized the African American community. And, the other three candidates, they split the white vote. And I received a certain percentage of the white vote, and I ran second and won.”

Barbara Flynn Currie, Democrat, longtime House majority leader:  “As a result of proportional representation, my district became the first in Illinois history to send two women from the same party to the state legislature, myself and Carol Moseley Braun.”

Currie was the longest serving woman in the Illinois legislature, serving for 40 years, twenty-two years as House majority leader.

Adeline Geo-Karis, a Republican legislator elected under both PR and winner-take-all systems:  Proportional representation “made it easier for women and minorities to get elected.”

Barbara Flynn Currie, Democrat, former House majority leader: “In the days of proportional representation, we had African Americans representing majority white districts, and white representatives coming from districts that were predominantly African American.”

PR even helped elect black Republicans, but now the Republican Party in Illinois—as in the rest of the nation—is mostly lily-white.

***************************

When you listen to these Illinois legislators, Republicans and Democrats alike, one quality stands out: their belief that the other side deserved representation. They took seriously the Golden Rule of Representation: “Give unto others the representation you would have them give unto you.” They believed doing so was good for their state’s welfare and good for the political and legislative process.

Compare that view to national politics today, to the down-and-dirty, zero-sum "winner take all" game it has become in this age in which hyper-partisan leaders will do whatever it takes to beat the other side. The current battle over mid-decade redistricting is just the latest tragic fiasco as our representative democracy tumbles over the cliff’s edge into the dark deep fissures of post-democracy

Indeed, Chicago Tribune political reporter Rick Pearson wrote that the rolling coalitions which formed in the Illinois House “often helped lead to centrist pragmatic policies.” The Chicago Tribune has opined that “many partisans and political independents have looked back wistfully at the era of cumulative voting. They acknowledge that it produced some of the best and brightest in Illinois politics.”

BYE BYE CUMULATIVE VOTING…

So if cumulative voting in three-seat districts was so great, what happened? Why did Illinois get rid of it in 1980?

It was the dawn of the Reagan “government is the problem” era, and the Illinois state legislature, failing to take the temperature of the times, foolishly voted itself a hefty pay increase. With a populist battle cry of “get rid of the politicians,” an opportunistic politician sponsored what was known as the Cutback Amendment—a statewide ballot measure that sought to “cut back” the size and cost of state government by shrinking the number of elected politicians by a third. Little recognized, unfortunately, was that the ballot measure also did away with cumulative voting (today, under many state’s initiative process, combining repeal of cumulative voting with a reduction in the number of legislators would likely be a violation of the “single subject” rule).

But the return to winner-take-all, single-seat districts quickly led to the by-now-familiar litany of problems: little competition, partisan polarization, “if you win I lose” winner-take-all dynamics, regional balkanization, low voter turnout, and so on. It virtually wiped out the Democratic Party in DuPage County and other conservative areas, and killed the GOP in Chicago and many other cities. It led to so many lopsided, one-party districts that ever since then nearly half of Illinois’s House races have been uncontested by one of the major parties because everyone knows who will win those races. This is the legacy of "winner take all" elections in Illinois, indeed in all 50 states.

The return of "winner take all" elections in Illinois also has led to an alarming concentration of power in the hands of the “Four Tops” – no, that’s not a Motown singing quartet, that’s the majority and minority leaders in both the House and the Senate. According to the Chicago Tribune’s Pearson, the Four Tops now “use the cudgel of the potential loss of campaign cash to dictate the issues to be considered and how a member should vote. The formation of a true bipartisan coalition now is rare.”

The Illinois story strikes at the very heart of Americans’ notions of “representation.” Millions of “orphaned voters”—Republicans living in Democratic areas, Democrats in Republican areas, and third-party supporters and independents everywhere—usually do not have a voice. But in Illinois under proportional representation, Republican legislators were elected in the blue liberal cities, as were Democrats in the red conservative areas. Independents, moderates, and the wings of the parties had a place at the table; so did women and minorities. In Illinois, purple America had a home.

A federal bill called the Fair Representation Act (H.R.4632) has been introduced in the 119th U.S. Congress by Rep. Jamie Raskin and Rep. Don Beyer, which would implement proportional representation for electing the US House of Representatives. Instead of cumulative voting, the FRA would use an even better method known as proportional ranked choice voting (also known as “single transferable vote”). PRCV has all the benefits of cumulative voting but it also has other desirable features, such as ranked ballots that prevent spoiler candidates, split votes and wasted votes that can sometimes happen with cumulative voting.

The various 50 US states are often laboratories for innovation and experimentation for each other. The Illinois experience with proportional representation has a lot to teach us as we grapple with the demanding challenges that our failing democracy is facing.

Steven Hill  @StevenHill1776 @StevenHill1776 bsky.social