Content Authored by Sarah John
1 - 10 of 11 results
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New Jersey 2015 State Legislative Elections: The Predictive Power of Partisanship and One Party Rule
- Posted: November 13, 2015
- Author(s): Sarah John
- Categories: Home
New Jersey’s 2015 state election is striking for the predictive power of partisanship and the proportion of voters who are locked out of representation by a state legislator of their preferred political party. Under multi-winner RCV, most New Jerseyans would be able to cast a meaningful vote for a candidate of choice in the General Assembly and few voters would be trapped in a district without a representative from their preferred party.
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Anything but Fair: The Sad Tale of the Canadian Election System
- Posted: October 18, 2015
- Author(s): Sarah John
- Categories: Home
Canada likely will soon have another minority government . Pollsters project the Liberal Party will lead with between 110 and 150 seats, likely besting the incumbent Conservative Party government. No Canadian party has topped 40% of the vote since 2000, and plurality elections result in severe distortions in representation. The Liberals' platform includes a call for ranked choice voting. -
The Ranked Choice Voting Act
- Posted: August 13, 2015
- Author(s): Sarah John, Haley Smith
- Categories: Home
Prominent legal scholar and political activist Larry Lessig has entered the 2016 race for the White House. Lessig’s plan for promoting equal representation advocates for passage of FairVote’s Ranked Choice Voting Act. The act seeks to promote better representation and end gerrymandering once and for all, promote collaboration between parties, and deliver political representation more proportional to the composite of the people.
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Inequitable British Elections Provide Lessons for US Reformers
- Posted: May 12, 2015
- Author(s): Sarah John
The 2015 British election delivered a single party government that little more than a third of Britons voted for. The election also once again returned a parliament with very different political affiliations than British voters. Many have commented on the disproportionate election results. Few Americans are likely to imagine that similarly disproportionate results occur in the US on a regular basis. In this blog post, FairVote explores the disproportionality of UK election results country-by-country and compares them to regional US congressional results. It shows that similar levels of disproportionality are already experienced in the US, meaning that calls for fair representation voting are just as relevant in the US as in the UK.
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Survey on Ranked Choice Voting in Bay Area Shows Promise for New System
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The Most Obvious Option: Ranked Choice Voting for Party Leadership Elections in the English-Speaking World
- Posted: November 12, 2014
- Author(s): Sarah John, Mike MacNevin
Next week, the results of the New Zealand Labour Party's leadership election will be announced. The New Zealand Labour Party is the latest political party to use ranked choice voting (RCV) to determine its leader. This article documents the tried and true use of RCV in internal party elections in New Zealand, Canada, the United Kingdom and Scotland. International experience augurs well for the use of RCV in party elections within the United States, especially the Republican Presidential Caucuses in Iowa. -
The Cart before the Horse (Race): FairVote Projections Showcase the Lack of Choice in House Elections
- Posted: October 30, 2014
- Author(s): Sarah John
- Categories: Fair Voting/Proportional Representation, Home, Monopoly Politics 2012 Map
With the 2014 midterm elections almost upon us, FairVote takes time out to compare several pundits' forecasts of the US House results with our own Monopoly Politics projections. In doing so, we demonstrate the endemic lack of competition for US House seats. -
Strangeness of a One-Party Majority in New Zealand
- Posted: September 26, 2014
- Author(s): Sarah John
- Categories: Fair Voting/Proportional Representation, Asia and Oceania, Home, Elections Worldwide
At the end of an unusual election campaign, New Zealand's Mixed-Member Proportional Representation (MMP) electoral system has delivered Kiwis a strong mandate for the current government, with the first time a single party has won a majority of seats since the nation replaced U.S.-style plurality voting elections with MMP in 1993. The election also demonstrated many of the advantages that such fair representation voting systems have over the single-member plurality systems so often used in American elections. -
Continuing Electoral Reforms in Trinidad and Tobago
- Posted: September 15, 2014
- Author(s): Sarah John
- Categories: Ranked Choice Voting, Americas, Home, International Elections
Hot on the heels of electoral reforms last year, small Caribbean island nation Trinidad and Tobago has abandoned plurality voting in favor of runoff voting in its national elections. FairVote is keeping close watch on Trinidad and Tobago, as political parties, legislators and citizens continue to discuss voting systems, including ranked choice voting and fair representation voting, and agitate for reform.
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Ethnic Minorities and Proportional Representation in Myanmar
- Posted: September 5, 2014
- Author(s): Sarah John
- Categories: Fair Voting/Proportional Representation, Asia and Oceania, Home
Having tentatively thrust off their military dictatorship, Myanmar actively debates adopting Proportional Representation for its legislature. (Photo Credit: Htoo Tay Zar, Wikicommons)