A Times Editorial

Cumulative voting works divide

© St. Petersburg Times, published June 1, 2000

Considering all the ideas Florida has been borrowing from Texas lately, it's sad that one of the best has gone begging here.

Out there, some 50 communities have turned to cumulative voting to increase minority representation on school boards. It's working.

We need to pack some Florida pols on a bus and send them to Texas. Mention cumulative voting to our best and brightest, and their eyes glaze over as if you'd brought up quantum theory.

Amarillo, the latest progressive constituency in Texas, elected its first African-American and first Hispanic woman to the school board earlier this month. They did it in a citywide election that saw turnout increase to 12.7 percent from a dismal 3.4 percent two years earlier. (A police pension measure gets some of the credit.)

They did it without chopping the city into single-member districts resembling some extreme jigsaw puzzle. The winners will be thinking of the city as a whole rather than just their own neighborhoods.

Amarillo's reform came as the compromise to a lawsuit by civil rights groups seeking a court-ordered single-member districts. Texas' Governor George W. Bush gave the idea a boost when he signed into law a 1995 bill allowing school districts to use cumulative voting without having to wait for courts to force it on them.

The May 6 election disproved predictions that voters would be baffled by the new system. With seven candidates contesting four seats, each voter had four votes to cast in any combination he or she chose. That could be four votes for one candidate, three votes for one and one for another, two votes for one and two for another, or one vote for each of four candidates. The only rule: no more than four votes.

While the black candidate, who had been appointed to a vacancy on the board, ran well citywide, the Amarillo Globe-News noted that he received more than twice as many votes as there were voters at one of the polling stations with a large minority representation. This showed that voters had caught on to how they could cast more than one vote for him. "People seemed to understand," says John Kanelis, the newspaper's editorial page editor. "It was fairly self-explanatory. The voters elected four very solid candidates. . . two were incumbents and the two others were very fine, upstanding folks, very committed to the school system." Kanelis says the election also put to rest, at least for now, the concern that "some zealous special interest group" might work the system to get a foothold on the board. One of the incumbents had abstained from voting on the settlement for fear that such a thing would happen. It didn't, and she was re-elected.

Last I heard, Floridians and Texans weren't so different in orders of intelligence as to explain why they can be trusted with this sensible scheme and we can't. Our politicians can't be that much less enlightened, either.

The real reason, if you ask me, is that our pols are too sharp. They understand that if cumulative voting worked here for school boards, voters would ask the obvious question: Why not the Legislature? Lawmakers couldn't gerrymander themselves into safe single-member districts any longer. Everyone would be on the ballot, every time, and legislators who never worry themselves over minority votes would swiftly acquire a healthy new appreciation of the national motto e pluribus unum.

Single-member districts, which seemed like such a good idea 18 years ago, deserve much of the blame for how shortsighted and petty the Legislature has become. Even the new guys see it.

It's no coincidence, says Sen. Tom Lee, R-Brandon, that senators, who represent three times as many people as members of the House, weren't as gung-ho as the latter to take down growth management or pass the land-grab bill.

"You can elect someone in a House district who represents just seniors or just agricultural interests or just an environmentally oriented community," Lee noted last week. His 350,000 constituents, on the other hand, are an eclectic mix of agriculture, senior citizens, industry and "a lot of urbanizing and suburbanizing areas that are growing very fast. . . .

"You listen to a lot of different perspectives and you find yourself trying to balance them out," said Lee, who had just returned from trying to explain the session's outcome to some unhappy folks at the Polk County Farm Bureau.

It's not just school boards in Texas but corporations all over the world that use cumulative voting to broaden representation on their boards. Must Florida forever be so far, far, behind?

© St. Petersburg Times. All rights reserved.