Democratism Blog

Cumulative voting is not permitted in the 2016 Santa Clarita City Council election, a Los Angeles County Superior Court judge has ruled, according to SVC News and hometownstation (different articles, both by Jessica Boyer; ht Election Law Blog), because state law “does not define any cumulative voting ballot tabulation methods by which testing and certification criteria could be developed.”

Cumulative voting allows each voter, in an election in which multiple candidates win (such as for a city council), to cast multiple votes, including (if the voter chooses) more than one vote for a single candidate. It can increase the chance that candidates favored by a minority of voters will be elected (to a minority of the available seats). It was up for discussion in Santa Clarita for that reason, as a result of an action brought under the Voting Rights Act. In a handful of other similar cases it has actually been implemented. (E.g., in Chilton County, Alabama)

Capitalism, as a method of resource allocation, is a form of cumulative voting. Each of us votes as many of our dollars as we wish for whatever we desire and can afford, and the invisible hand steers resources in accordance with our aggregated preferences. Some have pointed to the cumulative character of market-based “voting” as somehow the source of the inequality inherent in the system and its creative tension with democracy. (E.g., Paul McCulley seems to imply this.)

It’s true that capitalism is bound to cumulative voting. On the other hand, while one person, one vote is our usual election rule, cumulative voting isn’t incompatible with democracy. As these voting rights battles suggest, far from demanding inequality, cumulative voting is arguably fairer, more broadly democratic, because—unlike one person, one vote—it measures voters’ preferences proportionally. It’s in fact that capacity for proportionality that makes cumulative voting essential to capitalism. For the same reason, one or another variety or variation of cumulative voting will be a key element of our Democratism project. Any complex system of resource allocation based on the preferences of large numbers of people must measure their views proportionally, whether it counts their views democratically or not.