What system of representation is more fair than what we have now?
Republicans in Summit County have felt underrepresented in the County Council for years. As at least 40% of the voting population, it is frustrating to have zero of the five council seats filled by Republican representatives when a fair proportion would have Republicans in two of those seats on average.
Democrats in Summit County know this feeling all too well, as they’re underrepresented in both the Utah Legislature and U.S. Congress.
Zero out of four state representatives whose districts include Summit County are Democrats, even though around 60% of Summit County voters are Democrats.
Zero of the four U.S. House representatives from Utah are Democrats, even while over 30% of Utahns are Democrats. Proportional representation would have a Democrat as one of the four state representatives of Summit County, and as one of the four U.S. House representatives on average.
Such underrepresentation is particularly painful in communities like north and south Summit, where over 70% voters choose Republicans, and in Park City and western Summit County, where over 60% of voters choose Democrats.
How do we more fairly match the political alignment of our representatives to that of the people in our county? Can we do this in a way that is also fair to geographical interests and to unaffiliated and third party voters?
Creating a fair system would take three changes.
- Switch from voting for each County Council seat separately to combining all seats into a single race, just like cities do for city council races.
- Allow counties to have non-partisan council elections, just like cities currently can.
- Change from a winner-take-all to a multiple-winner voting method for at-large elections. One example of a fair multiple-winner voting method is proportional ranked choice voting.
As Councilor Jeremy Rubell said at the April 28 Park City Council special session regarding the scenario of a multiple-winner, at-large election: “Proportional RCV, and I hope people do look this up, provides, by all the same research we’re talking about, fairer representation of the electorate in that scenario.”
Why is this more fair? Ranked choice voting allows voters to rank not only their top choice, but also their second, third, etc., choices. It has the most proportional of the results of the three fair voting methods listed on nonprofitvote.org.
RCV avoids the problem of vote splitting where a group of voters split their votes across two similar candidates, causing a third less favorable candidate to be chosen. Also, as noted at fairvote.org, proportional RCV effectively eliminates both intentional and unintentional gerrymandering.
The Legislature recently changed the law to require Summit County to go to a five-district County Council system in order to address the unfair nature of our current system.
However, as has been discussed in other letters and articles, this system has its own flaws. For instance, going to five single-member districts means we could only have a vote for who wins a single seat instead of having some say for each of the five council seats. Additionally, districting introduces the risk of gerrymandering that could still force unproportional representation.
If the Legislature meets to address these flaws this month, let’s ask them to instead implement a fair solution by changing the law to allow Summit County (and others) to hold nonpartisan, multi-winner, at-large county council elections using proportional ranked choice voting.
Kris Campbell
Unincorporated Summit County