tl;dr: Howard County parents and other voters shouldn’t have the ability to elect Board of Education members taken away from them. Instead they deserve a way to vote for the Board of Education that truly reflects their preferences, namely ranked choice voting.

How we got here, Board of Education edition

Prior to 2020 the Howard County Board of Education was elected at large, with three members elected during presidential election years and four members during gubernatorial election years. The primary election was used as a way to winnow down the number of candidates to be voted on in the general election.

2018 was the last election in which the traditional method was used: there were thirteen Board of Education candidates in the primary, of whom voters could vote for four. The top eight candidates advanced to the general election, at which again voters could vote for four. The top four were elected to the board.

For the 2020 election year the system was changed to have five members of the Board of Education to be elected by district (using the Howard County Council districts) and two members elected at-large in alternate election years.

In the 2020 primary election voters could vote for one candidate in their district. The top two candidates in each district advanced to the general election, at which voters again voted for one candidate. The top candidate in each district was elected to the board.

The at-large members were elected in the 2022 election year. In the 2022 primary election voters could vote for up to two at-large candidates in their district. The top four at-large candidates advanced to the general election, at which voters again voted for up to two candidates. The top two candidates were elected to the board.

A threat to stop voters from electing two board members

Now a new proposal is on the table: to take away the ability of Howard County voters to elect two of the seven Board of Education members they previously elected, and have those members appointed by the Howard County Executive from a list drawn up by the Howard County legislative delegation.

Of the remaining five board members that Howard County voters would still be permitted to elect themselves, two of them would be elected at-large in the same manner as today, and the remaining three would be elected from the Howard County portions of the state senate districts wholly or partly contained within Howard County (currently Districts 9, 12, and 13).

I’m not going to speculate on the possible motives of those proposing this new schemes, what problem they think they are trying to solve, or what they hope to accomplish by taking away the ability of Howard County voters to elect these two board members.

However I do want to point out two potential issues with the proposal:

First, as noted above, the two appointed members would have to be selected from a list prepared by the Howard County legislative delegation. But Howard County shares several of its legislative districts with other counties, including Senate Districts 9 (shared with Carroll County) and 12 (shared with Baltimore County), and House of Delegates District 9A (shared with Montgomery County).

Given that, it’s possible that four of the members of the “Howard County” delegation may not even live in Howard County. What business would they have picking candidates for the Howard County Board of Education?

Second, also as noted above, the three districts with elected Board of Education members would be based on the one Senate district wholly within Howard County (currently District 13) and the Howard County portions of the two Senate districts partially within the county (currently Districts 9 and 12).

But here’s the problem: there’s no guarantee that the Howard County portions of the second and third districts will be equal in population to the first district. It’s quite possible that the second and third districts may have only a few thousand—or even only a few hundred—voters in Howard County, yet those voters would have as much influence over the Board of Education as the tens of thousands of voters elsewhere in the county.

(This problem doesn’t exist with the current Board of Education districts because the councilmanic districts are constrained by the county charter to be approximately equal in population.)

The bottom line: besides taking away the ability of Howard County parents and other voters to select two of the Board of Education members, this proposal is complicated and fraught with potential problems that would further reduce the ability of Howard County voters to influence the composition of the board.

Ranked choice voting: a better alternative

Enough of that. Here I present a better proposal, introduced by Chao Wu and Jen Terrasa, that

• preserves the ability of Howard County voters to elect all members of the Board of Education (except for the student member, of course);
• does a better job of reflecting voters’ true preferences;
• can potentially eliminate the need to have Board of Education primary elections, and thus ensure that the maximum number of voters participates in electing the board; and
• is less prone to some of the problems some people might have had with both the traditional method of electing the Board of Education and the method used in 2020, as well as other methods.

That proposal involves so-called “ranked choice voting,” a scheme that allows voters to rank candidates in order of their preference, and that allows their votes to be transferred to another preferred candidate in the event that their most preferred candidate is not elected. Ranked choice voting is being increasingly adopted by jurisdictions around the US and has been popular with voters in elections where it has been used.

Advantages of ranked choice voting

To expand on what I wrote above, ranked choice voting has the following advantages over current ways of electing either a single Board of Education member (i.e., per district) or at-large board members:

Elimination of primary elections. As discussed in more detail in the next section, a ranked choice election can eliminate the need to have primary elections, since there is no need to winnow down the number of candidates for the general election.

Instead all candidates would run in the general election, and voters could indicate their preferences between them. If a voter’s favorite candidate were not elected then the voter’s indicated preferences could help elect another candidate they also favor. The ranked choice method of counting votes works the same whether there’s one seat to be decided (i.e., for a district) or more than one (i.e., for an at-large seat).

Eliminating primaries is especially important for Board of Education races, because the board is supposed to be a nonpartisan body open to anyone interested in improving the school system, not a body made up of professional politicians primarily interested in pursuing their party’s agenda. Having no primary election means that running for the board should be less expensive and thus open to more potential candidates, and holding the election at general election time means that the voter base will include voters beyond just party activists and partisans.

Reducing “wasted” votes. When there are multiple candidates in a race, voters will often not vote for their favored candidates because their chances of winning are uncertain. Ranked choice voting allows voters to give a first preference vote to their favored candidates and second, third, etc., preferences to other candidates. That way, even if their favored candidate loses, their votes can still help elect other candidates that they like.

Preventing a slim majority of voters from dominating other voters. In the tradition Board of Education elections, or in the current election of at-large members, it is possible for a slim majority of voters to elect all their favored candidates: they simply vote as a bloc for their candidates, so that all those candidates have the most number of votes and are thus elected. This leaves other voters without representation of their views. (Incidentally, this is exactly why traditional at-large elections have been outlawed in many jurisdictions, because they were used as a way to enable a white majority to disenfranchise Black voters.)

This bloc voting strategy doesn’t work in a ranked choice election because of the way the ranked choice mechanism works, giving voters representation in rough propertion to the size of their voting bloc. For example, in an election to pick two at-large board members, a 51% majority could elect one at-large member, but would be very unlikely to succeed in electing two. That’s because there would be enough people in the 49% minority giving their preferences for other candidates that one of those candidates would very likely be elected once all voter preferences were accounted for.

Making it more likely that winning candidates will have broad appeal among voters. The key to winning as a candidate in a ranked choice election is not just to have your core group give you their first preference votes. In an election with three, four, five, or more candidates, it’s unlikely that those votes alone will be enough to put you over the line. Winning thus also requires persuading voters outside your base to mark you as their second or even third preference.

Ranked choice elections work against extreme candidates because they typically won’t get second or third preferences from outside their base. (To use the jargon term, they aren’t “transfer-friendly.”)

Electing district and at-large board members using ranked choice voting

There are multiple ways that ranked choice voting might be used to elect Board of Education members. Here I present two possible schemes, one a variant of the method currently used, and one a variant on the traditional way of electing Board of Education members.

In the first scheme we would continue the current practice of electing five Board of Education members by district (using the five Howard County councilmanic districts) and electing two board members at large, but using ranked choice voting in both types of election.

In the 2020 election the maximum number of Board of Education candidates running in the primary election was six (in District 4); other districts had only four candidates (District 5), three (Districts 2 and 3), or two candidates (District 1, where no primary was needed).

As discussed above, with ranked choice voting we could skip the primary election and have all Board of Education district candidates run in the general election. Voters would rank candidates in order of their preference, and then the ranked choice vote counting scheme would go as follows:

1. If any candidate received more than 50% of the first preference votes then they would automatically be elected.
2. If no candidate received more than 50% of the first preference vote, then the candidate with the least number of first preference votes would be eliminated, and their votes transferred to other candidates according to the preferences of the voters who gave the eliminated candidate their first preference.
3. The process of eliminating candidates and transferring their votes would continue until one candidates accumulated enough votes to go over the 50% mark.

Note that when electing a single candidate, ranked choice voting is often referred to as instant-runoff voting: because voters would have already expressed their preferences for their second, third, etc., choices, there would be no need to hold a separate runoff election if one candidate didn’t receive more than 50% of the votes in the first round.

In 2022 eight Board of Education candidates ran in the primary for the two at-large seats. Again, we could dispense with the primary election and just have all candidates run in the general election, with two board members elected using ranked choice voting. The process would be similar to that described above, except that the “quota” would be 33.3%: any candidate receiving more than that number of votes, whether from first preference votes or from votes transferred from others, would be deemed elected.

Electing all board members county-wide with ranked choice voting

In this alternate scheme we would revert to the traditional method of electing three at-large Board of Education members elected during presidential election years and four at-large members during gubernatorial election years. The only difference would be to use ranked choice voting in the elections to select the top candidates, similar to what was described above for using ranked choice voting to elect two at-large members.

Again we could dispense with the primary and just have voters rank all candidates in the general election. In that case the quota for being elected would be 20% plus 1 when electing four board members, and 25% plus 1 when electing three.

Addressing objections to ranked choice voting

There are various objections that might be made to using ranked choice voting for Board of Education elections. In this section I address those objections.

“Ranked choice voting is too complicated for voters.” I don’t see this as an issue at all. Experience with other jurisdictions, including New York City, has indicated that voters understand the process of ranking candidates and are generally satisfied with the results. Howard County has a relatively highly educated population; if voters in New York City can understand ranked choice voting then I’m sure voters here can as well.

“Ranked choice voting is too complicated and expensive for the Howard County Board of Elections.” There would be some added expenses in conducting a ranked choice election, mainly to design the ballots and implement the special process for tabulating results. However, there are plenty of resources available for election officials on how to run ranked choice elections successfully and efficiently, and free and open source ranked choice tabulation software (e.g., RCTab) that has already been certified for use in several jurisdictions. It’s also possible that the Board of Elections could offset some or all of the cost by not conducting Board of Education primary elections, as discussed above.

“Since the ranked choice voting calculations depend on knowing the total number of voters, election results will take a long time to determine if voters can vote by mail.” The short answer here is that traditional elections can also take a long time to be decided when mail ballots arrive late, as happened in the 2022 House of Delegates race for District 9A. That’s a universal trade-off with voting by mail, if voters are allowed to mail ballots up to 8:00 PM on election day.

The longer answer is that since the ranked choice calculations can be easily and quickly done by computer, the Board of Elections could simply release intermediate results, including the effects of voters’ second, third, etc., preferences, as the votes come in. As with other elections, results would not be final until all late ballots were accounted for and any other ballot-related issues were resolved.

“The ranked choice voting computations are a ‘black box,’ and we don’t have confidence in the way the calculations are done.” This issue can be addressed by using open source software (like RCTab, mentioned above) to provide transparency for how the calculations are done, and then releasing data for the final certified results showing all ballots and how they were marked. This would enable other people (like me, or anyone else able to run the software) to double-check the official results.

“Ranked choice voting would unduly disadvantage (or unduly advantage—take your pick) parents’ groups, the Howard County Education Association, the Democratic or Republican parties, or other interest groups.” Interest groups could still make endorsements like they currently do, indicating which candidates should (in their view) receive voter preferences, and which should not. If they strongly favor some preferred candidates over others, they can specify how they think voters should rank them.

The only real caution interest groups would need to take would be to not endorse too many candidates, lest voters split their first preference votes between them and cause none of them to be elected in the first round. As noted above, this is actually an advantage of ranked choice voting: it reduces the ability of a 51% majority to elect all at-large members by bloc voting for a slate of candidates.

“Ranked choice voting is inferior to approval voting.” This is a more esoteric objection, but is worth addressing. Approval voting is a different voting scheme in which voters simply mark which candidates are acceptable to them—and can approve of more than one—and then the candidate with the most “approvals” is elected. Regardless of whether approval voting is superior to ranked choice voting, either in theory or in practice, its greater simplicity is only present in elections where a single candidate is elected.

So-called “multiwinner approval voting” is more complicated, requiring a choice between multiple methods of counting approval ballots. It would be simpler for both voters and election officials to use a standard ranked choice mechanism for both single-winner districts and multi-winner at-large seats.

“Ranked choice voting could produce a result that doesn’t reflect who should actually win.” There are no perfect voting systems that are guaranteed to produce intuitively “correct” results in every possible scenario. Ranked choice voting is no exception.

But ranked choice voting has been successfully used for many elections, not only in the US but also in juridictions like Ireland and Northern Ireland, which have conducted dozens of elections and elected hundreds of officeholders using ranked choice voting. (They just call it something different: “proportional representation with a single transferable vote,” or PR-STV.) There is no reason to think it can’t work just as well in Howard County.

For further exploration

• Proposed legislation relating to election of the Howard County Board of Education:
  • Ho. Co. 10-23. Proposed legislation to make two members of the Board of Education appointed, not elected. Sponsored by the chair of the Howard County delegation.
  • Ho. Co. 16-23. Proposed legislation to allow Howard County to elect the Board of Education using ranked choice voting. Sponsored by Chao Wu and Jen Terrasa.
• Ranked Choice Voting Resource Center. Includes resources for election administrators, the RCTab tabulation software, and links to ballot data for past ranked choice elections in several jurisdictions.

This is a follow-up to my seven-part series (starting with part 1) on expanding the Howard County Council, using ranked choice voting to elect council members, and leveraging automated redistricting software overseen by an independent redistricting commission.

This particular post describes an alternative to the three-district map proposed in that series and illustrated in part 5: I retain the idea of a fifteen-member county council, but instead of using three districts (with five members each) I use five districts (as with the current council), electing three members in each district. As in the previous example I assume the use of ranked choice voting.

An example five district map

The map above shows the five districts produced by the Auto-Redistrict software based on the data and options I provided. The new districts divide the county into the following areas; I’ve numbered the districts so that they roughly correspond with the current council districts:

• District 1. Ellicott City.
• District 2. Northeastern Howard County, including Elkridge.
• District 3. Southeastern Howard County, including North Laurel, Savage, Maple Lawn, and Fulton, as well as the Village of Kings Contrivance.
• District 4. Central Columbia, excluding some outlying villages.
• District 5. Western Howard County, including the Villages of River Hill and Harper’s Choice.

Because of the way that the Auto-Redistrict software works, starting from a random assignment of precincts to districts and then “evolving” the map from there, each run may end up producing a somewhat different map. For this run I was lucky, as I think this particular map does a really good job of matching up with the key population centers in the county. The main departure is that Columbia is too populous to fit into a single district; the proposed District 4 includes only about two-thirds of Columbia’s population.

Based on the 2020 Census figures, the racial and ethnic groups in these five districts would break down as follows:

• District 1. Non-Hispanic Whites would comprise about half the population of this of this district, at 49%, with Asians the next largest group at about 31%. Non-Hispanic Blacks would comprise about 10% of the population at 10%, with multi-racial people (or people of other races) and people of Hispanic origin the smallest groups, at about 5% each.
• District 2. Non-Hispanic Whites would be a slight minority in this district, at about 46%. Blacks and Asians would be roughly equal as a proportion of the population, at about 20% and 21% respectively. People of Hispanic origin would be about 10%, and multi-racial people or people of other races about 6%.
• District 3. Non-Hispanic Whites would be a distinct minority in this district, at 41% of the population, with Blacks and Asians about 25% and 18% respectively. The proportions of people of Hispanic origin and multi-racial people (or people of other races) would be comparable those in District 2, at 10% and 6% respectively.
• District 4. Non-Hispanic Whites would again be a distinct minority in this district, at 42%. This district would have the highest Black population, at 30%. The next most populous group would be people of Hispanic orgin at 12%, with Asians at 9% and multi-racial people and people of other races at 7%.
• District 5. This would be the only district with a non-Hispanic White majority, at 58%. The proportion of Asians would be about 21% (similar to District 2), while the proportion of Non-Hispanic Blacks would be about 11% (similar to District 1). The proportions of people of Hispance origin and multi-racial people (or people of other races) would be similar to those in District 1, at %% each.

(For figures for Howard County as a whole, see part 5 of the redistricting series.)

Assuming some level of vote transfers, Blacks would be well-positioned to win seats in Districts 4, 3, and 2 (in that order), while Asians would be positioned to win seats in Districts 1, 2, and 5. (Again, see part 5 for a caution about interpreting “Asians” as a monolithic demographic group.)

The remaining nine seats would likely go to Non-Hispanic Whites. As of the 2020 Census Non-Hispanic Whites are now a minority in the county overall, but they’d likely still comprise a majority on the county council—though not as much so as at present.

How would Democratic and Republican candidates fare in each district, and what might the final makeup of the Howard County Council look like? When ranked choice voting is used in a three-member district, a candidate is automatically elected if they are selected as the first preference on at least 25% plus one of the ballots cast (the “quota”).

So, for example, in the precincts comprising the proposed new District 1 I estimated the Republican share of the total vote for Howard County Council in the 2018 general election at about 38%. If a single Republican candidate ran in the Northeast District they would pretty much be guaranteed to be designated as the most preferred candidate by more than 25% of voters. The Republican Party would thus have one “safe” seat in the proposed District 1.

On the other hand, for the precincts in the proposed new District 1 I estimated the Democratic share of the county council vote in 2018 at about 62%. Suppose that only two Democratic candidates ran in the Northeast District and they each received roughly equal shares of the first preference votes—in other words, about half of Democratic voters picked the first candidate as their most preferred candidate and about half of Democrats gave their first preference to the second candidate.

Then given a 62% Democratic vote share each candidate would be designated as the most preferred candidate by about 31% of voters, well over the quota of 25% plus one, and both would automatically be elected. The Democratic Party would thus have two “safe” seats in the Northeast District.

With one Republican seat and two Democratic seats that would fill all three seats in the district. The Democratic party might be tempted to run three candidates, or the Republican party two, but they’d be running a risk in doing so. (See part 6 for a more in-depth discussion of this issue.)

A similar analysis can be done for the other districts. A summary of the likely results for all districts is as follows:

• District 1. Party breakdown: 62% Democrats, 38% Republicans. Likely two safe Democratic seats, one safe Republican seat.
• District 2. Party breakdown: 64% Democrats, 36% Republicans (similar to District 1). Likely two safe Democratic seats, one safe Republican seat.
• District 3. Party breakdown: 71% Democrats, 29% Republicans. Likely two safe Democratic seats and one safe Republican seat, although it’s possible that Democrats might be able to win all three seats against a weak Republican candidate.
• District 4. Party breakdown: 77% Democrats, 23% Republicans. Democrats would have an even better chance here for a three-seat sweep.
• District 5. Party breakdown: 51% Democrats, 49% Republicans. This would likely be a true swing district, with one safe Democratic seat, one safe Republican seat, and one seat a toss-up.

Overall with this district map and the use of ranked choice voting Democrats would likely win at least nine or ten seats on the Howard County Council and Republicans at least four. The remaining one or two seats would be in play, with the most likely result being a 10-5 or 11-4 Democratic majority—a more balanced result than the 4-1 Democratic majority on the current council. (And as noted in a previous post it’s also possible that a third party or independent candidate could capture a seat and act as a deciding vote on the council.)

Overall the idea of electing fifteen council members from five districts has a lot to recommend it: the use of five districts is a continuation of current practice, and the resulting map is very reflective of the geography of the county.

Electing only three members per district using ranked choice voting (as opposed to five) would also simplify both ballot design and the task of voters: there would likely be fewer candidates on the ballot to rank, and in some cases Republican voters at least would likely only need to indicate a first preference (assuming that they were indifferent as to which Democratic candidates were elected).

The major downside of this approach, at least from the point of view of the Republican party, is that it somewhat disadvantages Republican candidates relative to electing five members in each of three districts. That’s a general issue with ranked choice voting: for a minority party’s results to match its vote share, it helps to have more candidates on the ballot for voters to rank.

For further exploration

For the code used to generate the graphs above, see my document Howard County Council Expansion, Part 4. For the data behind the district maps see Howard County Council Expansion, Part 1. I ran the Auto-Redistrict application as described in part 4 of my redistricting series, using the same input data and the same settings, except that I specified five districts with three members each instead of three districts with five members each.

[This is part 7 of a seven-part series. See also part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4, part 5, and part 6. I also wrote a follow-up post that can be viewed as an alternative to part 5.]

In the first post in this series I proposed a comprehensive overhaul of the way we elect the Howard County Council:

1. Expand the council from five to fifteen members.
2. Reduce the number of council districts from five to three.
3. Elect five members in each district using ranked choice voting.
4. Draw the district lines using an automated process overseen by an independent nonpartisan commission.

In this final post I discuss what motivated me to spend the considerable amount of time it took to research the issue of county council redistricting, to analyze the data and find software to create a proposed district map, and to write this series.

Why do I care about this?

As I discussed in a previous post, my proposal would reduce the likely Democratic majority on the Howard County Council and allow Republicans to win proportionally more seats than they currently do. My fellow Democrats might therefore ask me, “Frank, what the heck are you thinking?!?” My answer is as follows:

First, in addition to being a proud and lifelong Democrat I am a strong believer in the value of liberal democracy: that liberty is best secured by a political system in which every person has equal power to influence government actions through their votes. Partisan gerrymandering and other forms of voter suppression work against that ideal.

The Republican Party was once the party that freed the slaves, amended the Constitution to help secure their rights, and made it possible for some of them (i.e., the men) to vote for the first time ever. How the GOP wishes to treat that great legacy through its present-day actions is its own business.

But my own party has evolved from being the past architect of Jim Crow, and I abhor anything it might do that reminds us of the days of the poll tax, voter “literacy” tests, and other measures that served to make the votes of some people worth more than those of other people.

Second, if we are ever to move beyond our current polarized and poisoned political environment then that process will have to start at the local level, where the rewards for political misbehavior are less and a dedicated movement for electoral reform might have a better chance of being successful.

Finally, I believe that campaigning in a more competitive political environment will ultimately be good for the Democratic Party. Partisan gerrymandering can make for a weak party: why bother doing the hard work of grassroots organizing when you can just redraw district lines every ten years to give yourself a structural advantage over the other party?

(And as a corollary, a weak party is a party that can find itself taken over by politicians primarily interested in their own success rather than that of their party and their fellow candidates and elected officials.)

I think that improving the future prospects of the Democratic Party at a state and national level starts with building strong county- and city-level party organizations. Running under a ranked choice voting system would mean that those organizations couldn’t afford to get lazy when it comes to winning elections. And a stronger Democratic party that can win competitive elections means increased opportunities to advance the interests of Democratic voters and of Americans in general.

Betting on an alternative

OK, so I care about this issue. But why spend so much time working on this series of blog posts and the data analyses behind them, when it’s not clear that anyone else cares about this? As David Clifton remarked on Facebook, “I haven’t noticed people lining up outside the council building to complain they feel they have inadequate representation.”

Maybe he’s right. Maybe Howard County Republicans don’t care that they only have 20% of the seats on the county council despite having at least a third of the vote share. Maybe Democratic voters in District 5, or Republican voters in some other districts, don’t care that they don’t have a realistic chance of electing a council member from their own party.

Maybe young Democratic activists looking to run for elective office are happy to wait a decade or more for one of the few county council seats to open up, as Democratic council members are term-limited or move on to other offices. Maybe all the people with political ambitions in Howard County are content to work within the current two-party system.

And maybe Chinese-Americans, or Indian-Americans, or Korean-Americans, or people of Hispanic origin, or members of any of the other racial and ethnic groups in the county, don’t mind that no one of their background has ever been elected to the county council.

The work I put into creating this series of posts is in effect one big bet that there are people out there who are not happy with the way we currently elect the Howard County Council, and would like to see some alternative proposals. But the alternatives that have traditionally been on offer—an increased number of single-member districts, or a few at-large seats, both elected by the traditional “first past the post” method—will likely not address people’s concerns.

We know this because Howard County has already tried these methods: The initial use of five at-large county council seats led to Democratic dominance on the council beyond what the Democratic vote share would warrant. Howard County Republicans put a lot of effort into promoting and ultimately achieving a switch to five council districts, only to eventually find that this mechanism was vulnerable to Democratic gerrymandering of the district lines.

The computer scientist Alan Kay once said of the original Apple Macintosh that it was “the first personal computer good enough to be criticized”. That was my goal with this series of posts: to put forth an alternative plan for Howard County Council redistricting that seriously attempted to address issues with the current council district system, was backed up by a reasonable amount of data analysis (sufficient at least for a first attempt), and produced a district map and associated party and racial/ethnic breakdowns that could be usefully evaluated and compared against other alternatives. Whether or not I’ve succeeded in that goal I leave to others to judge.

Anyway, that’s it for me. I’m a blogger, not an activist or organizer. If anyone else wants to take these ideas and run with them they’re welcome to do so. In the meantime I’d be happy to answer any further questions and concerns others might have about this proposal, and will update the previous Q&A post as appropriate.

For further exploration

There are a number of other explorations that could be done relative to Howard County Council redistricting and alternative electoral systems. I list some of them here in case anyone wants to take them on.

• Repeat my redistricting analysis, but using census blocks as the basic unit of the districts instead of precincts.
• Do simulations of ranked choice elections for the proposed three districts using one of the many RCV simulators available. (Just do an Internet search for “ranked choice voting simulator.”)
• Repeat the redistricting exercise I did, but for other numbers of council districts or members per district, for example five districts with three members each (for the same total of fifteen members as my proposal) or three districts with three members each (for a total of nine).
• Do an analysis of the current five single-member council districts, but using ranked choice voting (in this context known as “instant-runoff voting or IRV) instead of “first past the post.”
• Repeat the previous analysis, but use approval voting instead of ranked choice voting. (This would require some assumptions on how voters would vote in such a system.)
• Analyze councils with seven, nine, eleven, or thirteen single-member districts, elected using ranked choice voting.
• Repeat the previous analyses with approval voting instead.

[This is part 6 of a seven-part series. See also part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4, part 5, and part 7. I also wrote a follow-up post that can be viewed as an alternative to part 5.]

In the first post in this series I proposed a comprehensive overhaul of the way we elect the Howard County Council:

1. Expand the council from five to fifteen members.
2. Reduce the number of council districts from five to three.
3. Elect five members in each district using ranked choice voting.
4. Draw the district lines using an automated process overseen by an independent nonpartisan commission.

In this post I attempt to answer various questions people have raised about this proposal. (Note: I also addressed other questions about ranked choice voting for Howard County Council elections in an earlier post, “Ranked choice voting: questions and answers”; however that post assumed electing only one council member per district. Also, I may make updates to this post if I get further questions that merit answers, or if some of my answers turn out to be incorrect or incomplete.)

Expanding the council and having fewer districts

Doesn’t Howard County’s charter provide for automatically expanding the number of council members based on population?

Unfortunately, it does not. The county charter specifically states that

The legislative power of the County is vested in the County Council of Howard County which shall consist of five members who shall be elected from the Councilmanic Districts. . . . Each Councilmanic District shall elect one Council member. (Section 202. The County Council.)

So the county charter would need to be changed even just to add new council members, let alone move to multi-member districts.

A related question is whether the use of multi-member districts is consistent with the Maryland Constitution. The relevant language is as follows:

The charter for the government of any county governed by the provisions of this Article may provide for the election of members of the county council by the voters of councilmanic districts therein established, or by the voters of the entire county, or by a combination of these methods of election. (Article XI-A, Section 3A.)

This doesn’t explicitly rule out having a county council elected from multi-member districts, but it doesn’t explicitly permit it either.

If each district had five county council members, how would a person know which of their council members to call if they needed help?

First, this is a problem Howard County has faced before. Liz Bobo, Ed Cochran, C. Vernon Gray, Lloyd Knowles, and Ginny Thomas were all elected to the Howard County Council during a time when council members were elected at large, before council districts were adopted in 1984. So in a sense each of them had the entire county population for their constituency, and we can look to their experience to see how this worked in practice.

My own answer is as follows: If a constituent has five council members whom they can go to for assistance or to lobby for something, they’ll go to whomever has a particular interest or expertise in the issue at question, has proved helpful in the past, and/or has political views congenial to themselves.

Each council member in a district would likely have natural constituencies, based on the area of the county in which they live, particular interest groups they represent, and so on. For example, someone living in Ellicott City concerned about, say, Route 40 development would likely contact whichever council member in the West District happened to live in Ellicott City and seemed interested in that issue.

Council members within a district might then compete with each other to provide services to their constituents and address their concerns. It’s possible that in some cases a constituent who’s a Democratic voter may prefer dealing with a Republican council member, or vice versa, because they find that that council member is more effective at getting things done for them. But it’s also possible that they might join forces and establish unified channels for dealing with constituent requests, especially if they were of the same party.

Could we find fifteen people who could and would invest the time to serve on an expanded county council? And wouldn’t that be expensive?

I think there are more than enough ambitious political activists of all parties and ideologies in Howard to fill a fifteen-member council. And I would rather have them running for the county council and leave the Board of Education elections to people whose primary interest is in overseeing the Howard County Public School System.

As for the expense, in the proposed Howard County FY22 operating budget the budget for the county council is just under $6 million out of an overall budget of $1.8 billion, or about 0.3%. Even if it doubled or tripled with an expanded county council it would still be under 1% of county operating expenditures.

Wouldn’t expanding the county council expand the power of the county executive by weakening the ability of any one council member to hold the county executive accountable?

A county council is a legislature, and it’s inherent in the nature of a legislature that there will be many legislators relative to the executive. Even with a fifteen-member council an individual council member would have significantly more power to affect legislation and hold the executive branch accountable than (say) a typical Maryland state delegate out of the 141 members of the House of Delegates, or a typical state senator out of the 47 members of the Maryland Senate.

In practice I suspect that a fifteen-member council would delegate much of its work to committees, and the committee heads would hold significant power in terms of holding the county executive accountable.

If we reduce the number of districts from five to three, would western Howard County have any representation at all?

As discussed in the previous post, one of the three proposed districts would include western Howard County, and would have five council members (out of fifteen). It would be roughly equivalent to the current District 5, but a bit bigger, since it would contain about one hundred-ten thousand people vs. about sixty thousand today. I’m confident at least some of the five council members from the proposed West District would be from western Howard proper (as opposed to, say, Ellicott City or River Hill).

Wouldn’t decreasing the number of districts to three increase the potential to gerrymander districts so that no Republicans get elected to the Council?

This might be the case if members within each district were elected at-large. However ranked choice voting has the effect of ensuring Democratic or Republican shares of seats proportional to the parties’ vote shares. See my previous post.

Wouldn’t this proposal reduce the diversity of representation in terms of the different types of communities in Howard County, and enable certain high density areas to control the agenda?

My guess here is that the concern is with reducing the number of districts from five to three, thus lumping different different communities into larger subdivisions. My response is that even though the number of districts would be smaller, the number of council members per district would be much larger, and that would allow more effective representation of different communities.

For example, in the proposed West District there would be three relatively large communities, Ellicott City, River Hill, and Maple Lawn, along with the various smaller communities of Western Howard County. It’s perfectly possible that candidates could pitch themselves as representing one of those distinct areas (for example, a candidate specifically focusing on the Maple Lawn/Fulton area).

As for the concern about high-density areas controlling the agenda, areas with more population will always have more voting power and consequently more representation at the county council. See for example the current council, in which there are four council members representing relative populous and high density areas and only one representing the lower-density and less populous rural West.

Wouldn’t having a fifteen-member county council at least double or triple the meeting length? Would council members still be able to stay part time?

Baltimore city has a fifteen-member city council. We can look to them to see what to do (or not to do) to efficiently conduct council business. I suspect one approach will be to do what other larger legislatures do, namely to delegate some matters to committees, with the full council needing to get involved only at later stages.

If the goal of expanding the council is to enable council members to be better serve their constituents, couldn’t that be accomplished more cheaply and effectively just by increasing the number of staff members assisting each member?

Serving a constituent is not the same as representing a constituent. A progressive Democrat in District 5 may be served by their Republican council member, and served well at that, but may not feel represented by them. Ditto for a conservative Republican in other districts in which Democratic candidates invariably win.

Questions about ranked choice voting

In ranked choice voting how do you determine which excess ballots get transferred from a candidate that wins election to another candidate?

Per the FairVote advocacy site: “[Vote transfers] can be done many different ways, but the best way is to transfer a fraction of every vote to its next choice. That way, every vote is treated equally and no part of any vote is wasted.” So if a candidate is (say) 20% above the quota of first-preference votes, you take the second preference votes for everybody who voted for that candidate, multiply them by 0.2, and add these fractional votes to each of the candidates receiving the transfers.

How do you resolve the fact that whether Candidate A or Candidate B wins a seat may depend on whether a much lower ranked Candidate C gets more votes than Candidate D?

How do we resolve the fact that in the 1992 presidential election Bill Clinton won with a minority of the vote, due in large part to Ross Perot taking a large percentage of the vote away from George H. W. Bush, when it’s quite possible that most Perot voters would have preferred Bush to Clinton?

Any electoral system used in a race with more than two candidates has theoretical cases where it will fail to adhere to some set of reasonable criteria. (There’s even a mathematical theorem about this.) But how often do these situations occur in practice? Ranked choice voting with multi-member districts has been used for a long time in Ireland and Northern Ireland in particular (under the name “proportional representation with a single transferable vote,” or PR-STV) and to my knowledge has not experienced major issues of the type described.

It’s also important to look at the overall effect of a given electoral system. I dislike the “first past the post” electoral system (the one used in the US) not because of the results of a single presidential race, but because as a general tendency it tends to lead to the dominance of two political parties and the crowding out of independents and third parties, and because when used in multi-member districts it tends to produce one-party dominance at the expense of proportional representation. If ranked choice voting can help correct that then I think the occasional odd result is bearable.

Why wouldn’t parties at least run five candidates for five districts?

The problem here is as follows: When a party runs too many candidates relative to their vote share, it will likely find that none of the candidates get enough first-preference votes to be elected in the first round.

For example, in a five-member district using RCV the quota is approximately 16.7%. If Democrats had (say) a 60% vote share and first preference votes were spread relatively evenly among five Democratic candidates, each would receive about 12% of first preference votes, and would therefore fail to be elected in the first round (which requires exceeding the quota).

One might say, “well, they can be still be elected on transferred votes.” But the question then becomes, where are those transferred votes going to come from? In the second round the only source of transfers would be from winning candidates in the first round who have excess votes (i.e., above the 16.7% quota), or from a last-place candidate eliminated because no candidate met the quota.

But in our example no Democrats won in the first round, so there would be no excess votes to transfer from them. And if a candidate was eliminated, there are two possibilities: 1) The eliminated candidate was either a Republican or third-party candidate, which may not result in any transfers to Democrats. This would leave all of the Democratic candidates still below the quota. 2) The eliminated candidate was a Democratic candidate, in which case the Democratic party’s goal of electing five candidates has failed at the starting gate.

The second and subsequent rounds can be similarly analyzed. Such an analysis raises two questions: 1) If in the scenario described it’s very likely that at least one Democratic candidate will be eliminated, and possibly more than one, what was the point in running five candidates in the first place? 2) What happens if some people voting for Democratic candidates just mark a first-preference vote for their favorite candidate and don’t indicate second, third, etc., preferences? Then even after a Democratic candidate is eliminated there may not be enough second preference votes for other Democratic candidates available to make up the shortfall for another Democratic candidate.

Exploring the full ramifications of running too many candidates would take too long for this post. Suffice to say that I have read a lot of material about real-life RCV elections, and everything I have read is consistent with the view it is a potentially disastrous strategy for a party to field many more candidates than their vote share would warrant.

It seems really easy for a voter to accidentally mark two third choice candidates. Does this spoil the entire ballot?

It does indeed. The possibility of users making errors on ranked choice ballots is a real one. Opponents of ranked choice voting point to rates of spoiled or rejected ballots as high as 10% or more in past US elections using RCV.

This problem can be addressed through a combination of proper ballot design, voter education, and voter experience in using RCV. In the 2020 Irish general election the rate of spoiled ballots was only 0.8%. This is comparable to the rate of ballot spoilage and rejection for absentee and mail-in ballots in the 2020 US election, which per Ballotpedia was also 0.8%.

The New York City Democratic primary was conducted using ranked choice voting, and it took a long time to get the results. Is this an inherent problem with RCV?

The problems in New York City appear to be in large part due to inexperience and possibly outright incompetence on the part of the NYC elections board. However, there is one inherent issue with ranked choice voting that can in fact delay announcement of results:

As previously noted, key to ranked choice voting is the concept of the quota, which for a five-member district is defined as one-sixth of the total number of votes, plus one. But that means that in order to compute the quota you first need to know the total number of votes, and that means that you have to have all the votes in hand first before you can starting calculating results.

That’s not that big an issue for votes cast on election day. But what about mail-in ballots? Maryland’s current rules for mail-in voting allow up to ten days after election day for mail-in ballots to be received. If mail-in ballots are a significant fraction of the total vote then with an RCV election it might take several days after election day for there to be even preliminary results.¹

Why didn’t you consider using approval voting? Or a party slate system? These don’t have the problems that ranked choice voting does.

There are multiple answers here. First, my primary goal was to look at a system that both reduced the number of districts (to reduce the potential for gerrymandering) and provided representation for political parties and other groups commensurate with their voting power. That naturally led me to look at ranked choice voting, and having software (i.e., Auto-Redistrict) that could compute district maps under those assumptions sealed the deal.

Other systems may not necessarily address the goals I have. For example, approval voting (in which each voter can indicate multiple candidates that have their approval) is worth looking at when electing a council member in a single-member district. However when applied to a multi-member district, at least in its simplest form, it can behave like traditional at-large voting and thwart proportional representation.

For example, suppose that we use the simple rule that in a five member district the five candidates receiving the most approvals will be elected. If Democrats form the majority, if all Democratic voters approve all Democratic candidates, and if no Democratic voters approve Republican or third-party candidates, then all five Democratic candidates will be ranked in the top five based on the number of approvals, and all five will be elected.

I think it’s definitely worth considering other election systems for use in Howard County. But—not to brag or anything—I put a lot of work into my analysis of ranked choice voting in the context of Howard County Council elections, and I’d like to see a similar amount of work put into evaluating any suggested alternatives.

As mentioned above, I’ll update this post as appropriate. But in the meantime I’m coming to the end of the series, with my next (and final) post discussing why I think this general issue is so important.

For further exploration

The following may be of interest:

• The Wikipedia article on the single transferable vote (STV) electoral system contains a discussion of how vote transfers can be done. (STV is an older term for ranked choice voting.)
• Ballotpedia summarizes various arguments for and against ranked choice voting.
• The Center for Election Science, an organization supportive of approval voting, argues for it over ranked choice voting. Note that their analysis appears to assume that only a single candidate will win election, and if so is not necessarily applicable to multi-member districts like those I’ve proposed.
• FairVote, an organization supportive of ranked choice voting, argues for it over approval voting.

[This is part 5 of a seven-part series. See also part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4, part 6, and part 7. I also wrote a follow-up post that can be viewed as an alternative to this one.]

In the first post in this series I proposed a comprehensive overhaul of the way we elect the Howard County Council:

1. Expand the council from five to fifteen members.
2. Reduce the number of council districts from five to three.
3. Elect five members in each district using ranked choice voting.
4. Draw the district lines using an automated process overseen by an independent nonpartisan commission.

In this post I present the results of the automated redistricting I did using the Auto-Redistrict software to draw district lines for a fifteen-member Howard County Council elected in three districts using ranked choice voting.

What might the new districts look like?

The map above shows the three districts produced by the Auto-Redistrict software based on the data and options I provided. The new districts divide the county into the following areas:

• Southeastern Howard County, including Savage, North Laurel, most of east Columbia south of Route 175, and most of west Columbia except the Village of River Hill.
• Northeastern Howard County, including Elkridge, Ellicott City south of Route 40, and east Columbia north of Route 175.
• Western Howard County, including Ellicott City north of Route 40, Maple Lawn, and the Village of River Hill in Columbia.

Based on the 2020 Census figures, the racial and ethnic groups in these three districts would break down as follows:

• Northeast District. Non-Hispanic Whites would be a minority in this district, at 46%. Non-Hispanic Blacks and Asians would form roughly equal parts of the population at 18% and 21% respectively. People of Hispanic origin would be about half those percentages at 9%, and multi-racial people or people of other races would be the smallest group, at 6%.
• Southeast District. The population of non-Hispanic Whites in this district would be even lower, at 40%, with Blacks at about three-quarters of the White population, at 29%. The population of Asians and people of Hispanic origin would be roughly comparable at 13% and 11 % respectively, with multiracial people or people of other races again the smallest group, at 7%.
• West District. This is the only district in which non-Hispanic Whites would form a majority, at 54%. At 26% Asians would have almost as significant a presence in this district as Blacks would in the Southeast District. The population of Blacks would be the smallest of any of the three districts, at 10%. Finally, the populations of people of Hispanic origin and of multiracial people or people of other races would be relatively small, at 5% each.

For Howard County as a whole the breakdown of groups is as follows: 8% persons of Hispanic origin, with the remaining (non-Hispanic) population 47% White, 20% Asian, 19% Black, and 5% multiracial, with the number of American Indians, native Hawaiians, and people of other races negligible.

(The breakdown for those 18 years of age or older is similar but leans slightly whiter: 7% Hispanic origin, 51% White, 19% Asian, 18% Black, 3% multiracial, and the remaining groups negligible. I used total population figures with Auto-Redistrict because many of those under the age of 18 will become voters over the next ten years.)

The task of estimating the number of council members from the various racial or ethnic groups is complicated by several factors. One is that the “Asian” category encompasses both East Asians (e.g., Korean- or Chinese-Americans) and South Asians (e.g., Indian-Americans or Pakistani-Americans), and it can’t be assumed that they would vote in similar ways. Another is that it’s not clear who exactly comprises the group of multi-racial voters, and how they might vote.

Having said that, my guess is that under the proposed council district scheme that Blacks and Asians would be represented on the county council in rough proportion to their presence in the population. For example, there would likely be one Black council member from the Northeast District, and at least one and possibly two Black council members from the Southeast District. There would also likely be an Asian council member from the West District, and possibly one each from the Northeast and Southeast Districts.

How would Democratic and Republican candidates fare in each district, and what might the final makeup of the Howard County Council look like? When ranked choice voting is used in a five-member district, a candidate is automatically elected if they are selected as the first preference on just over one-sixth of the ballots cast, or about 16.7% of those voting. (This number is known as the threshold or quota.)

So, for example, in the precincts comprising the Northeast District I estimated the Republican share of the total vote for Howard County Council in the 2018 general election at about 34%. If a single Republican candidate ran in the Northeast District they would pretty much be guaranteed to be designated as the most preferred candidate by at least 16.7% of voters. The Republican Party would thus have one “safe” seat in the Northeast District.

On the other hand, for the precincts in the Northeast District I estimated the Democratic share of the county council vote in 2018 at about 66%. Suppose that only three Democratic candidates ran in the Northeast District and they each received roughly equal shares of the first preference votes—in other words, about a third of Democratic voters picked the first candidate as their most preferred candidate, about a third of Democrats gave their first preference to the second candidate, and about a third of Democrats gave their first preference to the third candidate.¹

Then given a 66% Democratic vote share each candidate would be designated as the most preferred candidate by about 22% of voters, well over the quota of 16.7%, and all would automatically be elected. The Democratic Party would thus have three “safe” seats in the Northeast District.

What about the remaining seat? Suppose that the Republican Party ran two candidates, the Democratic Party ran four, and each candidate received first preference votes from a roughly equal share of their own party’s voters. Then each Republican candidate would receive about 17% of first preference votes (34% divided by two), and each Democratic candidate would receive about 16.5% of the first preference votes (66% divided by four).

Since all six candidates would be close to the threshold value of 16.7%, and they could not all be elected, it would be a toss-up as to whether the Democrats or Republicans would win the fifth and final seat after accounting for all the second, third, etc., preferences expressed by voters.²

A similar analysis can be done for the other two districts. A summary of the likely results is as follows:

• Northeast District: Party breakdown: 66% Democrats, 34% Republicans. Likely three safe Democratic seats, one safe Republican seat, and one toss-up.
• Southeast District: Party breakdown: 75% Democrats, 25% Republicans. Likely three safe Democratic seats, one safe Republican seat, and one leaning Democratic.
• West District: Party breakdown: 53% Democrats, 47% Republicans. Likely two safe Democratic seats, two safe Republican seats, and one leaning Democratic—albeit only slightly.

Overall with this district map and the use of ranked choice voting Democrats would likely win at least eight seats on the Howard County Council and Republicans at least four. The remaining three seats would be in play, with the most likely result being a 9–6 or 10–5 Democratic majority—a significantly more balanced result than the 4–1 Democratic majority on the current council. (And as noted previously it’s also possible that a third party or independent candidate could capture a seat and act as a deciding vote on the council.)

In my next post I attempt to answer various questions that have been raised regarding this particular proposal and regarding ranked choice voting in general.

For further exploration

For the code used to generate the graphs above, see my document Howard County Council Expansion, Part 3. For the data behind the district maps see Howard County Council Expansion, Part 1.

[This is part 4 of a seven-part series. See also part 1, part 2, part 3, part 5, part 6, and part 7. I also wrote a follow-up post that can be viewed as an alternative to part 5.]

In the first post in this series I proposed a comprehensive overhaul of the way we elect the Howard County Council:

1. Expand the council from five to fifteen members.
2. Reduce the number of council districts from five to three.
3. Elect five members in each district using ranked choice voting.
4. Draw the district lines using an automated process overseen by an independent nonpartisan commission.

In this post I discuss how to draw district lines for the proposed three districts, with ranked choice voting used to elect five members in each district.

Automated redistricting for everyone

At present the boundaries of the five Howard County Council districts are created and proposed by an appointed redistricting commission, and then adopted by the county council. Each of the two parties appoints an equal number of candidates for the commission and the county council appoints the chair of the commission.

In practice the district boundaries are actually drawn by computer, with each of the two parties using redistricting software to draw potential districts so as to favor their own cause. Since Democrats currently have a majority on the county council, the district boundaries adopted will be those that help get Democrats elected to the council.

Ordinary voters and third parties have little or no influence over this process: the rules are designed to exclude third parties from the redistricting commission, and access to redistricting software has traditionally been restricted to the two major parties.

However there’s no longer any reason (other than inertia and a desire to maintain control) for county council redistricting to be done in this way. Any interested person can now download free software that can automate the process of redrawing district boundaries. They can also download the data that’s required as input to the redistricting software, including population data derived from the US Census, digital maps of precinct boundaries, and past election results. Armed with this software and data they can create their own proposed districts.

That’s exactly what I’ve done for this series of posts. I used the Auto-Redistrict software (created by Kevin Baas), in large part because it supports creation of multi-member districts elected using ranked choice voting. Not only is it free but its source code is also available, so that the way it works can be inspected for correctness and potential biases.

Running Auto-Redistrict to create a three-district map

As input to the program I used the public data released by the Maryland Department of Planning after each decennial census for use in Congressional redistricting. The data files include precinct boundaries and populations for each precinct, including population figures broken down by race and ethnicity to help ensure that districts are not drawn to disadvantage particular minority groups.¹

I also used as input to the program the public data on election results released by the Maryland Board of Elections. This can be used to help ensure that districts are not drawn to disadvantage particular political parties. In this case I used results from the 2018 general elections for Howard County Council, since those are the results most relevant for county council redistricting.

(Since there was no Republican candidate in District 3, I estimated the potential vote share for a hypothetical Republican candidate in that district. I also did further estimation to account for early voting and absentee voting, which are not reflected in the official precinct-level results.)

The Auto-Redistrict program allows you to tweak various parameters representing various trade-offs between different goals: for example, how important is it that the districts’ populations be as equal as possible, or that districts be as compact as possible? In my case I used all the default settings.

Howard County has over a hundred precincts. The number of ways in which those precincts could be combined to form three districts is much too large for a person to check each possible district map, and even too large for computers. The Auto-Redistrict software therefore takes a different approach: it generates a set of random maps, evaluates them according to the various criteria being used (compactness, competitiveness, etc.), and then selects the best maps to be carried forward. It then mimics biological evolution, creating a new set of maps by combining different maps together to form new ones, while also introducing some random changes (analogous to mutations).

This process—evaluating maps, picking the best ones, using them to create new maps, and then repeating the evaluation—continues until the generated maps become more and more alike, representing the “best of the best” in terms of meeting the desired criteria. In my case I stopped the program after over eight thousand iterations and went with the last map produced. Using a modern laptop the whole process took about half an hour from start to finish.

“Automated” doesn’t mean “nonpolitical”

Having extolled the virtues of using software to automate the process of doing redistricting, I now have to stop and issue a caution: just because the process can be automated using software designed to handle the mathematics doesn’t mean that we can simply “leave it to the mathematicians”. There are multiple aspects of automated redistricting that entail decisions that are political in nature.

That means in turn that an inclusive approach to redistricting requires the inclusion not just of people who can run software like Auto-Redistrict, but also of people who can question the assumptions and data that go into the software, as well as the results that come out of it. Hence my suggestion that redistricting needs to be overseen by an independent commission that is (as much as possible) designed to be nonpartisan and representative of all the major groups with a stake in the results.

As but one example, I made a judgement call when deciding what party-related data to include in the input to Auto-Redistrict. In particular, I chose to use only the results of the 2018 county council races, and did not use the results of the 2018 county executive race (which had a higher vote share for Republicans). Others may quibble with that decision.

I also haven’t considered using detailed voter registration data (e.g., registered Democrats vs. registered Republicans in each precinct). To my knowledge that data is not fully publicly available, so if I were able to obtain detailed voter registration data I would not have been able to present my analysis in a fully public and transparent manner. Making that trade-off is, again, an inherently political decision: should I have prioritized possibly doing a better job of drawing maps at the expense of excluding people without access to the same data?

Other decisions are involved in how redistricting software like Auto-Redistrict is configured to run. For example, I chose the default settings when prioritizing geometrical considerations like compactness of districts against considerations of fairness like balancing party, racial, or ethnic vote shares. Perhaps others might have had different priorities. Again, these become political decisions, and should not simply be left to the “experts” to decide.

So what I’ve done here in running Auto-Redistrict for my proposed fifteen-member three-district county council shouldn’t be construed as a perfect effort, not to be questioned, or even as the best that could possibly be done. It’s just one example out of many possible ones. In any case, in the next post I’ll present my particular results.

For further exploration

For more information on attempts to take redistricting out of the control of legislative bodies and put it in the hands of independent redistricting commission see:

• “Independent and Advisory Citizen Redistricting Commissions” is a list of links to information about states that have reformed redistricting to one extent or another.

For more on drawing district boundaries using computer sofware see:

• The Auto-Redistrict web site has more information about how the software works and how to run it.
• My document Howard County Council Expansion, Part 1, discusses creating the input data that Auto-Redistrict uses (Howard County precinct maps combined with demographic data and election results). It includes a detailed discussion of the measures I took to select particular data to be considered, and to estimate data where it was not available for one reason or another.
• My video “Howard County Council Redistricting with Auto-Redistrict” demonstrates how to run Auto-Redestrict to generate a district map for the proposed expanded Howard County Council.

[This is part 3 of a seven-part series. See also part 1, part 2, part 4, part 5, part 6, and part 7. I also wrote a follow-up post that can be viewed as an alternative to part 5.]

In my first post I proposed a comprehensive overhaul of the way we elect the Howard County Council:

1. Expand the council from five to fifteen members.
2. Reduce the number of council districts from five to three.
3. Elect five members in each district using ranked choice voting.
4. Draw the district lines using an automated process overseen by an independent nonpartisan commission.

In this post I discuss why ranked choice voting is a better way to elect five members in each of the three proposed districts.

Why ranked choice voting?

If we want to have only three districts, with five members in each, and we don’t want to elect members using at-large voting within each district, how should we elect each district’s members? My proposal is to use ranked choice voting.

Using ranked choice voting in a multi-member district (like the three districts proposed here) helps ensure that elections are fair for all voters, and that each voter has an equal chance to make their votes matter. It allows voters the option to rank candidates in order of preference: one, two, three, and so forth. If a particular person’s vote cannot help their top choice win, that vote counts for their next choice.

The image above shows a sample ballot for a hypothetical Howard County Council election for the West District (as discussed in a future post) conducted using ranked choice voting. Here the voter, a progressive Democrat, indicated Democrat candidate Alice Doe as being her first preference, but then has marked Emily Zhang of the Green party as her second preference, ahead of the other Democratic candidates. She then marked Democrats Latoya Green and Sanjeev Patel as her third and fourth preferences, and then marked the other candidates as her fifth, sixth, etc., preferences.

Note that there is no requirement that the voter indicate a preference for all six candidates; she could have just stopped after marking her ballot for the three Democratic candidates and Emily Zhang. However, it may be that some of the Republican candidates are more acceptable to her than others, so she may want to give them preference ahead of other candidates. She may also dislike libertarians on general principle, so takes care to mark the Libertarian party candidate as least preferred.

(Note that there are only three Democratic candidates and three Republican candidates on the ballot. You may wonder, why wouldn’t the two parties put forth five candidates each, given that there would be five open seats? That’s because in ranked choice voting it doesn’t make sense for a party to put more candidates on the ballot than that party’s expected share of voters would warrant. I’ll discuss this in more depth in a future post, but will note for now that in this example district Democrats and Republicans are evenly matched.)

In a five-member district like the hypothetical Howard County West District in this example, there would be a 16.7% “quota” for election.¹ If more than 16.7% of ballots cast marked a particular candidate as their first preference then that candidate would be automatically elected. Any of those votes that they received from voters in excess of the quota would be transferred to other candidates, more specifically the candidates named by their voters as their second preferences.²

In our example suppose that Democratic candidates Alice Doe and Sanjeev Patel had enough first preference votes to win outright in the first round of county. (In other words, they both got more than a 16.7% share of all first preference votes cast.) If enough Doe or Patel voters followed our example voter and indicated a second preference vote for Emily Zhang of the Green party, the excess votes for Doe and Patel (i.e., above the quota) could help elect Emily Zhang in the second round of counting, after all excess voters were transferred to other candidates.

More specifically, if Zhang did not have enough votes in the first round of counting to exceed the quota, she might have enough votes in the second round to exceed the quota, by virtue of votes transferred to her because Alice Doe and Sanjeev Patel didn’t need the votes, and their voters marked Zhang as their second preference. Zhang would then be deemed elected in the second round of counting. (The colloquial term for this is “getting in on transfers.”)

Other candidates could benefit from this as well. For example, if Republican Joe Jones were elected with first preference votes in the first round of counting, and he were the only Republican candidate to be elected in that first round, his excess votes (above the quota) could end up being transferred to Elana Garcia or Christopher Park.

On the other hand, suppose that after excess votes from the first round were transferred to other candidates, there were still no candidates with votes in excess of the 16.7% quota. In that case the candidate with the least amount of votes would be eliminated, and their votes would be transferred to others according to their voters’ preferences. So, for example, if Emily Zhang were in last place after the second round of county, any votes assigned to her after the first round would be transfered to other candidates (probably Democratic candidates) heading into the third round of counting.`

Vote tabulation would proceed in this manner round by round, transferring votes from successful candidates to other candidates, and eliminating last place candidates, until five candidates were elected. (The way in which the quota is defined makes it impossible for more than five candidates to be elected.)

(In some cases voters may not rank all candidates. For example, the voter in the example above may indicate her preferences for Emily Zhang, the Green party candidate, and the three Democratic candidates, but may not indicate her preferences regarding the Republican candidates and Janet Smith, the Libertarian candidate. If so, her ballot will not be considered further once Emily Zhang and the three Democratic candidates are either elected or eliminated; at that point the ballot is said to be “exhausted.”)

Promoting political and ideological diversity

In addition to allowing voters to rank candidates from the two major parties according to the voters’ preferences, ranked choice voting also allows voters to vote for third-party candidates without “wasting” their vote. This can be seen in the example above: even if Emily Zhang was eliminated in the second round of counting, the expressed preferences of voters like our example voter could end up helping to elect other candidates in the third or subsequent round.

As another example, suppose that there were a third party associated with the Democratic Socialists of America. That party could run a DSA-backed candidate in a council district with lots of progressive voters, and encourage those voters to give that candidate their first preference. If the DSA-backed candidate were unsuccessful then their first-preference votes would simply transfer to the candidate (most likely a progressive Democrat) that those voters had marked as their second preference, and could then help that candidate be elected.

The same logic works for independent candidates. For example, if a “Never Trump” conservative couldn’t make it through the local GOP primary then they could run for a county council seat as an independent. If their popularity were high enough then they could potentially attract enough first and second preference votes to be elected in their own right. As with the DSA example above, a Republican voter giving such a candidate their first preference would not be “throwing their vote away,” since they could—and presumably would—designate the official Republican candidates as their second, third, etc., choices.

Promoting racial and ethnic diversity

The same dynamic works for promoting racial and ethnic diversity on the council. For example, a Black Democrat running for the council in a district could appeal to Black Democratic voters to give the candidate their first preference votes, and then to give other Democratic candidates their second preference votes. Such a candidate might also attract second or third preferences from conservative Black voters who might give their first preference votes to Republican candidates.

This would allow Black candidates to leverage Black voter support in all three districts, as opposed to having Black voters be concentrated in a single district.

Similarly, a Korean-American Republican candidate might get first preference votes from Korean-American Republican voters, second preference votes from other Republican voters, and second or third preference votes from Korean-American independents or even Democrats who wanted to see some Korean representation on the county council.

To repeat, in none of these cases would voters be “wasting” their votes on a candidate with marginal prospects. They could vote according to their own heart’s desires, secure in the knowledge that their preferences would be reflected in the final results one way or another.

So, let’s assume that we have three council districts with five members each, and that we’d elect those members using ranked choice voting within each district. How could we draw district lines in a way that would reflect the racial, ethnic, and political diversity of Howard County, be open and transparent, and could be justified to the voters and candidates who participate in the resulting elections? That will be the topic of my next post.

For further exploration

For more on the topic of ranked choice voting see the following:

• FairVote is an advocacy site for ranked choice voting. Its recent report “Ranked Choice Voting Elections Benefit Candidates and Voters of Color” and its analysis of the use of ranked choice voting in the 2021 New York City primaries are particularly relevant to my comments above regarding promoting more diversity on the Howard County Council.
• The Ranked Choice Voting Resource Center has more in-depth information, including a detailed discussion of issues relevant to election administrators.

For a more detailed discussion of how ranked choice voting might work in the context of a Howard County Council election, see my 2012 post “Electing a council that reflects Howard County, part 1” and its followup post. These were written for the case of electing the five current Howard County Council members by ranked choice voting, but they are also relevant to the problem of electing five council members in a single district of the proposed three. (Note that the posts refer to ranked choice voting using the alternative name “Single Transferable Vote” or “STV.”)

[This is part 2 of a seven-part series. See also part 1, part 3, part 4, part 5, part 6, and part 7. I also wrote a follow-up post that can be viewed as an alternative to part 5.]

In my previous post I proposed a comprehensive overhaul of the way we elect the Howard County Council:

1. Expand the council from five to fifteen members.
2. Reduce the number of council districts from five to three.
3. Elect five members in each district using ranked choice voting.
4. Draw the district lines using an automated process overseen by an independent nonpartisan commission.

In this post I discuss why having three districts is better than having fifteen districts (or no districts at all) when it comes to promoting diversity on the Howard County Council.

Why three council districts? Why not fifteen?

Why reduce the number of council districts from five to three? With fifteen council members shouldn’t we have fifteen council districts?

The first problem is that electing one council member in each of fifteen districts can dilute the voting power of minorities. Look at the graph above, which shows the population percentages for various racial and ethnic groups within an example set of fifteen council districts. (The associated district map was drawn by the same automated system described in the next post.)

As of the 2020 Census non-Hispanic Whites make up less then half of Howard County’s population, but they would still form the largest voting bloc in thirteen of the fifteen example districts. There is only one example district in which Blacks would form the largest voting bloc, and only one in which Asians would.

If such a map were to be adopted, and if voters tended to vote for people of their own race or ethnic group, the result would likely be a White-dominated council, similar to what’s been the historical norm in Howard County. It’s possible that there might be only one Black council member out of fifteen (down from one in five currently), and only one Asian council member.

Creative drawing of district lines could “solve” this problem, by lumping minority populations into a few select districts where they might have a chance of electing one of their own. But this would be at the expense of minority voters in other districts. (This is similar to the situation with the current council districts, in which Black candidates have been elected in District 2 but not in any other districts.)

The same techniques used to draw district lines to favor particular racial or ethnic groups also can be—and have been—used to favor one political party over another. This brings us to the second problem:

Drawing district lines for fifteen districts is a lot of work compared to drawing them for five districts, and offers more opportunities for partisan gerrymandering and endless political fights over redistricting. The process of Howard County Council redistricting is contentious enough—I literally wrote the book on this—so why make it even more divisive and time consuming than it already is? The fewer districts, the less opportunity for gerrymandering.

Howard County originally had five council members representing the entire county, with no councilmanic districts. Howard County now has over three times the population as it did then. So you can think of the proposed scheme as a return to the county council’s roots, with each of the three districts being comparable in population to Howard County fifty years ago, and each district having five council members representing it, just as Howard County as a whole did back then.

But . . . the original Howard County Council elections had a fatal flaw, one which we need not and should not replicate. I discuss that in the next section.

Why not elect council members at-large?

OK, so having fifteen districts may not be a good idea. Why not eliminate districts altogether, and elect all fifteen council members in county-wide at-large elections? Or have three districts as suggested, with five members chosen in at-large elections in each district? Or have a smaller number of districts (say, nine or ten) and then elect the remaining members at large, similar to how Howard County Board of Education elections work?

The problem here is that at-large elections can entrench the dominance of majorities and work against minorities: since voters can vote for multiple candidates, and the candidates with the most votes win, if a 51% majority votes as a unified bloc for a slate of at-large candidates, they can succeed in having all of their candidates being elected. The 49% minority would then have no representaion at all.

This is not just a theoretical concern. It’s exactly what happened in Howard County in the first years after it moved to a council form of government: Because all five members were elected at-large, and because Democrats formed a majority of voters (in large part due to the establishment and growth of Columbia), the council was dominated by Democrats. In fact, at one point there was no Republican council member at all.

The same thing would happen with an expanded fifteen-member council elected in at-large elections. In fact, it would likely be even worse than in the 1970s because the ratio of registered Democrats to registered Republicans is much larger now.

The push to switch the Howard County Council from at-large elections to elections by district came mainly from the Republican party, because Republicans were under such a disadvantage in at-large elections. But election by districts is not a panacea for Republican concerns, especially when the number of districts is large.

Suppose we abandon the idea of electing fifteen council members in county-wide at-large elections and go back to the idea of electing one council member in each of fifteen districts. Republican candidates would then be severely disadvantaged if we used our hypothetical example set of fifteen districts (which was created by an automated system designed to minimize partisan advantages).

Although there’s a substantial body of Republican voters across the county, as shown in the graph above there is only one district out of the example fifteen districts in which Republican voters would form a clear majority, and only one other district where their numbers would be comparable to Democratic voters. (This is based on estimates derived from the 2018 county council elections.)

If there were only three districts, and members were chosen at-large in each district, the Republican party would still have the problem of majority dominance. There are so many Democrats relative to Republicans that it would probably be possible to draw district lines such that all three districts had Democratic majorities. Using at-large elections to elect five council members within each district would allow those majorities to elect full slates of Democratic candidates in those districts, again locking Republicans out of county council representation.

So if we want to have only three districts, with five members in each, and we don’t want to elect members using at-large voting within each district, how should we elect each district’s members? That’s the topic of my next post.

For further exploration

For the numbers and code behind the graphs above showing the racial, ethnic, and party breakdowns for a hypothetical fifteen districts, as well as the generated fifteen-district map, see “Howard County Council Expansion, Part 2.”

[This is part 1 of a seven-part series. See also part 2, part 3, part 4, part 5, part 6, and part 7. I also wrote a follow-up post that can be viewed as an alternative to part 5.]

Howard County is too big for its county council

For over fifty years now Howard County, Maryland, has been governed by a five-member county council and a county executive.¹ In those fifty years Howard County has grown from about sixty thousand people to well over three hundred thousand, more than five times as many people as when its first county council was sworn in.

In 2019 the Howard County Charter Review Commission recommended expanding the size of the county council from five members to seven. This was a relatively minor change, but one which seemingly did not attract any support from the county executive, the county council, or—for that matter—anybody else. So why am I writing about this topic now?

Because I don’t think the Charter Review Commission was being bold enough in its recommendations. Even I wasn’t being bold enough in my previous post recommending a move to ranked choice voting for either a five- or seven-member council.

I believe that the structure of the County Council needs a more thoroughgoing reform in order to bring it closer to the people of Howard County, better reflect the preferences of county voters, and potentially reduce political polarization that can bleed over into other areas, most notably the Board of Education.

So in line with the motto “go big or go home” I’m coming back with an even bolder four point recommendation:

1. Triple the size of the Howard County Council, expanding it from five members to fifteen.

2. At the same time, reduce the number of council districts from five to three, with five council members elected from each district.

3. Elect each district’s council members using ranked choice voting, in which each voter would list the candidates they want to see elected, in order of preference.

4. Establish a nonpartisan commission to draw the district lines using a process that takes into account various criteria important in redistricting—creating compact and contiguous districts with equal populations, not diluting the voting power of minorities, and ensuring competitive races not marred by partisan gerrymandering—with all code, data, and background assumptions made publicly available.

In this post I address the first part of this proposal, namely expanding the Howard County Council.

Why fifteen council members?

Why expand the Howard County Council? First, to provide better service to county residents. When the Howard County Council was first established there was one council member for every twelve thousand people or so. Now each council member serves almost seventy thousand people, a number that makes it more difficult for a council member to attend to the needs of any given constituent.

As the graph above shows, Howard County is in the top five of Maryland juridictions when it comes to population per council member or county commissioner. The average ratio for all Maryland counties and Baltimore city is thirty-six thousand people per member. The median ratio is twenty-two thousand people per council member. (Half of all counties have a higher ratio than the median, and half a lower ratio.)

Note that Baltimore city, despite having a population considerably larger than Howard County, has a ratio of population to council member that is significantly lower than Howard County. That’s because Baltimore city has a fifteen-member city council, compared to Howard County’s five-member county council.

How big should the Howard County Council be? Increasing the council by only two members, as the Charter Review Commission recommended, would in my opinion just be putting a bandage on the problem without really solving it. On the other hand, if we wanted to keep the ratio of constituents to council members the same as in the late 1960s we’d need a council of twenty-five to thirty members. That’s a lot: I’m not sure the council chambers in the George E. Howard building has enough room to hold that many council members.²

Let’s consider an intermediate approach, increasing the size of the Howard County from five to fifteen members to match the size of the Baltimore city council. That would lower the ratio of population to council members from the current sixty-six thousand to a third of that value, or twenty-two thousand people per council member. This would match the current median value for Maryland, and be comparable to the ratios for St. Mary’s County and Allegany County.

Of course Howard County is still growing in population, so this ratio would degrade over time. However a fifteen-member council should be large enough to suffice for most if not all of the twenty-first century without requiring any further expansion.³

Enabling more people to serve Howard County

Increasing the size of the Howard County Council also provides more opportunities for up-and-coming community activists and politicians to serve the county—and we have a lot more qualified candidates than there were in the late 1960s. Consider the picture above: of the many Howard County Democratic activists attending this dinner, surely more than a handful would be interested in making a future run for the Howard County Council and would make good candidates and council members.

If we have a lot more people qualified to run for elected positions but the number of positions doesn’t change, that leads to increasingly contentious, expensive, and partisan elections—something we see in the US at the national level, as more and more people compete for a limited number of Congressional seats.

The large number of qualified candidates can also lead to ostensibly nonpartisan elected positions becoming bones of partisan contention, as with the Howard County Board of Education: thwarted by the lack of openings on the Howard County Council, ambitious political activists can try to use the Board of Education as a springboard to future runs for the county council or other positions.

As a result Board of Education elections may become increasingly partisan affairs, featuring explicit party endorsements and people voting for candidates based primarily on their political affilations. Expanding the county council could help reduce this incentive.⁴

Let’s assume that there’s a consensus on expanding the Howard County Council, and that having fifteen council members is the desired council size. How should the county be divided into districts, and how should council members from each district be elected? That’s the subject of my next post.

For further exploration

For a discussion of the need to expand legislative bodies, in this case the US House of Representatives, see:

• “America Needs a Bigger House” by the New York Times editorial board.
• “Congress Needs to Be Way, Way Bigger” by David Litt in The Atlantic.

For commentary about increasing partisanship in Howard County Board of Education races see:

• “Will Partisan Politics Make The Howard County Public School System No Longer The Best In The State?” by Scott Ewart at Scott E Blog.
• “What’s at Stake in the Increasingly Politicized Howard County Board of Education Elections” by Jeremy Dommu at The Merriweather Post.
• “Partisan school board elections erode trust” by Robert Miller (letter to the editors of the Baltimore Sun).

For the numbers and code behind the graph above showing the population per council member or county commissioner, see “Howard County Council Expansion, Part 1.”