cumulative voting

Penn Law Dean Emeritus Colin Diver, whose time as dean overlapped with Guinier’s time on the faculty, said she “pushed the envelope in many important and constructive ways: advocating for alternative voting methods, such as cumulative voting, questioning the implicit expectations of law school faculty that female students behave like ‘gentlemen,’ or proposing alternative methods for evaluating and selecting applicants to the Law School.”

She proposed a variety of alternatives, like cumulative voting, in which people get a number of votes to distribute as they wish — a process that might allow minority voters to concentrate their support on a single candidate and in that way increase their influence as a bloc.

She insisted that her positions had been taken out of context, and she noted that cumulative voting was already used in communities around the country.

I have argued for a long time for proportional and cumulative voting — counting mechanisms that are fairer and more representational and used effectively in other countries and in some local elections here in the United States.

Last fall, Pleasant Grove, Calhoun and the other plaintiffs agreed to settle the case.The city will adopt a new process called cumulative voting, under which each resident gets five votes to allocate however they want among the candidates.