At its simplest, proportional representation means that a share of voters earns an equal share of representation; 40 percent of votes, for instance, would yield 40 percent of seats. Proportional representation means both full and fair representation. That is, to the greatest extent practicable, every vote helps elect someone the voter supports, and like-minded voters elect candidates in proportion to their share of the electorate. 

The winner-take-all systems used to elect the U.S. House of Representatives weaken our votes overall and systematically favor some voters over others. A large majority of votes cast in the 2020 election were wasted votes; they were counted toward losing candidates or for winning candidates who didn’t need them to win. In this system, wasted votes are not distributed evenly between the two major parties: Rural-urban polarization favors Republican voters, and modern technology makes it easy for partisans to intentionally gerrymander maps in favor of either party.

Proportional ranked choice voting would minimize wasted votes; a large majority of votes would be effective in every district and every election, making every vote much more powerful. As a result, both urban and rural interests would be better represented, and intentional gerrymandering would be a thing of the past. 

Proportional representation is fair representation

Proportional ranked choice voting is proportional representation: Groups of voters elect representatives they support in proportion to their numbers. Fair representation is inherent in proportional representation.

For his textbook, Electoral Systems: A Comparative Introduction, political scientist David Farrell measured the proportionality of legislative election results across 78 countries during the 2000s.[1] Of the top 10 most proportional countries, nine use a party list system and one (Malta) uses proportional ranked choice voting.[2]

New York City used proportional ranked choice voting in multi-winner districts to elect its city council for five election cycles, from 1937 to 1945.[3] It held partisan elections, so the impact of the reform on partisan representation is clear. The Democratic Party retained majority control throughout, but votes cast for opposition parties elected a fair share of seats, whereas before the reform and after its repeal, they elected only a nominal number of seats, as Figure 14 shows.

Proportional representation also ensures fair representation of both urban and rural interests, even with severe urban-rural polarization. In Why Cities Lose, political scientist Jonathan Rodden contrasts the political histories of the many European countries that adopted proportional representation with the few that retained winner-take-all amid the rise of urban, industrialized workers’ parties in the early 20th century.

In winner-take-all countries, cities’ interests were packed in populous urban centers, exaggerating the power of conservative rural parties — and severely disadvantaging cities. They also suffered from problems coordinating the interests of the centrist liberal parties that previously dominated cities and those of the new left-wing workers’ parties, a tension that usually severely weakened the liberal parties. 

Countries that adopted proportional representation, on the other hand, saw all interests earn fair representation. Liberal parties continued to play an important role, and parties avoided urban-rural polarization, since right-of-center parties were not shut out inside of cities and left-of-center parties were not shut out outside of them. Proportional representation also avoided coordination problems, leading to better and fairer governance overall.  The reason, according to Rodden: “In a perfectly proportional electoral system, there is no such thing as a ‘wasted’ or ‘surplus’ vote.”

Proportional ranked choice voting avoids wasted votes

These are the two kinds of wasted votes: those cast for losing candidates and those cast for winning candidates who don’t need them to win. The proportion of effective votes  (that is, those not wasted) is a benchmark for the power of each vote. Effective votes are those the winner needed to win. If most votes are effective, then votes are very powerful. If most votes are wasted, then votes are fairly weak. More powerful votes means more accountability to voters, leading to better and more responsive government.

Proportional ranked choice voting increases the proportion of effective votes in two ways. The first is by electing multiple winners, each of whom have their own share of votes; the second is through the round-by-round count.

Suppose an area within a state elects three representatives. Under the current winner-take-all system, the area would be divided into three districts. The most a candidate would need to win would be a majority (50 percent + 1), so there cannot be more effective votes than that. Under proportional ranked choice voting, there would be no single-winner districts; all three candidates would run in the same, geographically larger, area.  And the threshold for election would be 25 percent + 1 for each of the three candidates, raising the number of effective votes to over 75 percent of the total.

In other words, using a single-vote system to elect multiple winners has the potential to greatly reduce the number of wasted votes, and the more winners elected the better. With each increase in district magnitude, more people gain the power to elect a candidate they genuinely support, moving our system closer to full representation, as Figure 11 from 2.2 (Proportional ranked choice voting) showed (reproduced below).

Using a single-vote system to elect multiple winners improves voter power. However, such a system would require a lot of coordination among voters to work. Otherwise, voters could inadvertently waste their votes on popular candidates who do not need them or on those with no chance of victory. Fortunately, the ranked ballot and round-by-round count used by ranked choice voting virtually eliminates these problems.

With proportional ranked choice voting, voters rank their choices to ensure their vote won’t be wasted. Recall that the two kinds of wasted votes are those cast for candidates who already have enough to win and those cast for candidates who lose. Under ranked choice voting, voters’ whose top choice is in either of these categories still have a say in the election; their vote transfers to their next choice, ensuring it is not wasted. 

At the end of a ranked choice voting count, each winner should have the same number of votes counting for them: precisely the threshold of election. That means that no votes count for candidates who did not need them. Some votes will still be cast for losing candidates, of course, but that number will be quite small compared to winner-take-all elections.[4]

Even then, some voters who vote for the remaining losing candidates will have also ranked one of the winners. Cambridge, Massachusetts, uses proportional ranked choice voting to elect its nine-seat city council, and more than 95 percent of voters rank a winning candidate in their top three choices every election cycle. Even with three- and five-winner elections, at least 90 percent of voters will likely have a winner ranked first, second, or third.

The upshot: Votes are significantly more powerful under proportional ranked choice voting than under winner-take-all. Consequently, candidates work harder to turn out supporters and to persuade voters to support them, even if only as a second choice. 

The end of gerrymandering

When every voter has the power to elect a candidate they support, the particulars of district lines matter less. Even when restricted to three-winner districts, proportional ranked choice voting makes gerrymandering much harder and less effective. In districts electing five or more candidates, it becomes effectively impossible to control partisan outcomes through redistricting.

Look at the results of different kinds of multi-winner districts. Colorado, for instance, was apportioned eight congressional seats under the 2020 census. The 2020 presidential result suggests about 55 percent of the state’s voters vote Democratic.[5] In an ordinary election year, a purely proportional result would elect four Democrats, three Republicans, and include a competitive eighth seat that leans Republican. 

To see if a district map is broadly fair, we can assess whether it would likely match that statewide result in a normal election year. Using data from the 2020 census, two multi-winner district maps were drawn for Colorado. One shows roughly what we would expect to be adopted under the Fair Representation Act: a five-winner district including Denver and its neighboring regions, and a three-winner district encompassing the rest of the state. The second map is a bizarre thought experiment, packing Denver into a small three-winner district and lumping the rest of the state into a giant five-winner district. 

As it turns out, these maps, shown in Figure 15, project the exact same partisan representation. Both should yield four Democratic seats, three Republican seats, and an eighth seat with a slight Republican lean. The maps are wildly different, and both were drawn without referencing the partisan data that was later overlaid on them. But proportional representation is proportional representation: No matter how the districts are drawn, Republicans and Democrats each have the power to elect their fair share of seats across the entire state (though naturally the first map is preferable for other reasons).

Two hypothetical multi-winner district maps for Colorado

Neither different arrangements of lines nor changes in the number elected in each district can undermine fair representation under proportional ranked choice voting, so long as every district elects at least three candidates. Districts that elect fewer winners would be easier to gerrymander than those that elect more, because districts that elect more winners will be larger and more diverse and also more precisely represent the voting population. But going from single-winner districts to three-winner districts goes a long way toward guaranteeing fair representation, whereas going from three-winner to five-winner districts is a more modest improvement.

In 2021, sample multi-winner district maps were drawn for every state, following the guidelines in the Fair Representation Act. The maps included 43 five-winner districts and 56 three-winner districts, with other district sizes filling in only if mathematically necessary. No attempt was made to ensure partisan fairness when deciding where lines would go; instead, districts were drawn simply to keep counties, cities, and other communities of interest together. The result was the following partisan landscape:[6]

Overall partisan analysis of sample multi-winner districts

When FairVote staff attempted the same task, their overall analysis came out even more balanced, with 201 seats having some Democratic lean and 200 seats having some Republican lean.[7] Any reasonable set of proportional ranked choice voting district maps would likely have nearly the same result: one in which the system did not create a significant advantage for either party and in which the number of seats won by either party’s candidates would likely match their national vote share, as Table 4 shows.

Representation of left, right, and center

Under winner-take-all, we think of most districts as “red” and “blue,” but this distorts the country’s true diversity. Winner-take-all elections dilute the votes of Republicans in places like Massachusetts and Democrats in places like Oklahoma and Kansas. Proportional ranked choice voting gives those voters their voices back.

Consider the map of Texas in Figure 17. The district bordering Louisiana is about 71 percent Republican and 29 percent Democratic. Under Texas’s current congressional map, that area includes only safe Republican districts. Yet if 29 percent prefer Democrats, they will reliably win a seat and could win two. Democratic voters live there, but winner-take-all rules lock them out of representation, ensuring that their votes are perennially wasted on candidates who cannot win. Proportional ranked choice voting would make their votes effective.

Sample multi-winner district map for Texas

It’s not merely those on the left and right who get fair representation but also those who do not neatly fit into the existing partisan binary. In most cycles, that same Texas district would probably elect four Republicans and one Democrat, but those four Republicans would each win based on their own constituency of votes and, as such, would each likely reflect different perspectives within the Republican coalition.

When the Pew Research Center updated its political typology report in 2021, it found that the Republican coalition comprises five distinct groups, each with their own ideas and priorities. The winning Republican slate in this part of Texas would likely represent voters who prioritize different aspects of the American conservative movement, which includes socially tolerant libertarian-leaning voters, populists who support both strong border enforcement and liberal family welfare programs, and any number of similar blends of viewpoints that do not neatly fit into the GOP’s leadership agenda.

This vision applies across virtually all hypothetical multi-winner districts. Under almost any plausible district map in which all districts elect at least three winners, no part of any state would be so red or so blue that a candidate from the minority party could not win 25 percent support. Democrats from Oklahoma and Arkansas would go to Congress alongside Republicans from Massachusetts and Manhattan. The entire country would benefit from their perspectives, and majoritarian policies could pass even when opposed by party leadership.

With proportional ranked choice voting, the simplistic us-versus-them political binary would buckle under the influx of representatives who are accountable to new perspectives and who expect their leaders to work across the aisle when appropriate. With more voices at the table, the U.S. House would be better able to address the country’s most pressing and seemingly intractable problems, and lawmakers would be less likely to play political hardball just to deny the opposition a win.

Notes

[1] Farrell, David. Electoral Systems: A Comparative Introduction, 2nd Ed., Table 10.4.

[2] Ironically, the two party system in the United States artificially inflates our ranking on this measure, putting us at 14th, while Canada and the United Kingdom, which each use the same winner-take-all system as the United States, place 62nd and 71st respectively. The table also includes a column listing voter turnout, demonstrating that countries with proportional representation consistently draw more voters to the polls than those with winner-take-all; the only two countries with less than 50 percent turnout are the United States and Senegal. The two countries in the table with proportional ranked choice voting, Malta and Ireland, have 93 percent and 67 percent turnout respectively.

[3] New York City was one of two dozen cities to adopt proportional ranked choice voting during the Progressive Era. It was the largest city to do so, and the only one to use partisan elections. Elections were by borough, with seats apportioned based on the number of votes cast. See Jesse Docter and Theodore Landsman, “Proportional Representation in New York,” FairVote, Dec. 18, 2017, available at https://www.fairvote.org/proportion_representation_in_new_york_city_1936_1947.

[4] After the final round, any votes remaining for candidates below the threshold will not transfer, so those are wasted. Additionally, some number of voters will choose not to rank every candidate in the contest, and some of those votes will become inactive during the count.

[5] Biden beat his national popular vote margin by a little more than 9 percentage points in Colorado, so we would expect a generic Democrat to beat a generic Republican by a little over 9 percentage points, meaning they should win a little more than 54.5 percent of the statewide two-party vote.

[6] These projections say nothing about how many Republicans or Democrats would be elected; rather, they show how many seats could be won by voters who typically vote Democratic or Republican today, all else being equal, many of whom are independent voters or swing voters.

[7] FairVote Action, Sample Maps for the Fair Representation Act, https://fairvoteaction.org/advocacy-priorities/the-fair-representation-act/fra-sample-maps/ (last visited Jan. 23, 2023).