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CHARTER WATCH - For a multi-everything city of nearly 4 million people, proportional RCV offers the best chance to provide fair representation and reduce city council scandal
If any city is badly in need of political reform, it’s Los Angeles. Three recent city councilors have been sentenced to prison for corruption, and a fourth one is going to trial. And just three years ago, three Latino city councilors were caught in a scandalous hot mic moment using ugly racial and homophobic slurs as they plotted how to gerrymander favorable council districts.
A charter review commission in LA is currently weighing various reforms that could amount to either something significant or the usual ho-hum. LA’s scandals are a byproduct of its “winner-take-all” district elections that have been used for decades to elect its 15-member city council. In a “multi-everything” city like Los Angeles, single-seat districts amplify and exacerbate the turf wars over both representation and land-use issues. Whether between different racial groups, or downtown vs. neighborhoods, westside vs the Valley, renters vs landlords or liberals vs. moderates, arguing over housing, transportation, public safety and more, nothing magnifies tension more than this “if you win, I lose” winner-take-all brand of politics. “If I win the district seat, you and everyone else lose.” It’s a formula for political in-fighting and voter alienation.
It also incentivizes city council members to rule over their individualized districts like their own personal fiefdoms, in which they control the cookie jar in the form of allocating “discretionary” funds, licensing and zoning. That’s been a formula for criminal behavior.
Some hope that a newly passed independent redistricting commission (IRC) can wring some lemonade from these lemons. But that seems unlikely. An IRC can bring some semblance of fair play to the line-drawing process, but at the end of the day whoever sits in the council member’s chair doles out the spoils. It’s too much temptation for one person, and that’s a major problem that an IRC cannot easily resolve. Besides, IRC’s don’t always work as intended; in San Francisco during its 2022 redistricting, its IRC saw a major failure when the mayor’s allies on the IRC managed to set the Asian and Black communities at each other’s electoral throats, each group fighting for more representation.
LA’s problems are so much deeper than what an IRC can reasonably solve. Los Angeles needs to use a better democratic method that is not based on these toxic “winner-take-all” dynamics.
LA’s city council districts bigger than either NY City or Chicago
Let’s close our eyes and imagine a different kind of democracy for the City of Angels.
Los Angeles, with a population of nearly 4 million people and only 15 city council districts, has – by far – the largest city council districts of any major city in the country. That works out to about 253,000 residents per city council district. That is simply too over-populated to provide effective “representation.” Chicago with almost 3 million people has 50 city council districts each representing about 56,000 residents. New York City, with twice the population of LA, has 51 city council districts each representing about 166,000 people.
Imagine a store in which a single salesclerk has to service a quarter million customers. LA has had the same 15 council seats since 1925, when the population was only a quarter of what it is now. So LA’s enormous, highly populated districts, overseen by a single city councilor with veto power over discretionary spending and land-use issues, have contributed greatly to poor constituent service and a civic frustration and alienation that feeds the unpopularity of city government. If LA increased the size of the council from 15 to 27 seats, about 140,000 Angelenos per seat, that would bring the council closer to the people.
Proportional ranked choice voting for the 21st century
But here’s the reform that will really give Los Angeles a 21st century democracy. To elect those 27 seats, instead of using the same old winner-take-all method electing one-seat district fiefdoms, LA would benefit from electing its city councilors from nine districts with three seats each. And the city should elect them using a method known as proportional ranked choice voting (PRCV).
Under the rules of PRCV, when electing three seats at once, a candidate would need 25% of the vote to win one of those three seats. That key difference would open up representation to any constituency group, coalition or community of interest that can win a quarter of the vote in any of these 9 districts.
Within that design, Latino voters would be in a strong position to elect candidates to one or two seats in most of the 9 three-seat districts -- close to a council majority. In three or four of the 9 districts, the Black community would be in a strong position to win a seat in each district, and in other districts the Black vote would be influential. The Asian vote also would be strong in several of these districts, as would the White vote, and influential in other districts.
In some districts you could end up with two Latinos elected and one African-American; or one Latino, one Asian and one White councilmember, or any number of other representational combinations. The zero-sum game of “this is my district, not yours” would be over. The redistricting-gerrymandering wars would be over. Such a mosaic of multi-racial and multi-interest representation is a better fit for modern day Los Angeles than trying to gerrymander diverse representation into a couple dozen single-seat districts, contorted together like a jigsaw puzzle.
Consider city council District 15, the elongated shoestring district reaching all the way south to the Port of Los Angeles. The racially and culturally diverse neighborhoods of San Pedro, Wilmington, Watts and Harbor City have all been packed into the same district for decades, and so must share a single city councilor. Yet the last six councilmembers, going back 70 years, have been White and from San Pedro, which holds less than one-third of the district’s population.
If CD15 elected its city councilor as part of a three-seat district, racially diverse communities like Watts and Wilmington would be far more likely to also elect a representative from their areas than under LA’s current single-seat districted system. Each three-seat district would be competitive for several political viewpoints. Such multiracial representation in every council district would do a much better job of representing LA’s diversity.
With PRCV, city councilors also would no longer be the kingpins of their own personal district fiefdom. With three elected councilors per district, each would act as a check against the type of behavior that has resulted in so many council members convicted for corruption.
And voters would be liberated to sincerely rank their favorite candidates instead of being stuck with one-choice elections in which they often pick the lesser-of-two-evils. A lot more Angelenos, no matter their race or where they live, would be able to enthusiastically rank multiple candidates and see them win one of the three seats. Use of ranked ballots also would encourage coalitions to form fluidly in response to the pressing issues of the day, instead of in backroom deals with land use arm-twisting or racial gerrymandering.
About 200 jurisdictions across the US have adopted some form of proportional voting, usually to resolve voting rights disputes over minority representation. In Portland, Oregon, a city of nearly 700,000 with a racially-conflicted past, a multiracial charter commission voted 17-3 to place PRCV on the ballot and voters adopted it overwhelmingly, with its first successful use in November 2024. New York started using ranked choice voting in 2021, and in its first use elected a city council with a governing majority composed of women of color, and a Black mayor and city council president.
The LA charter commission has a real opportunity to lead Angelenos into the 21st century with a modern representative democracy. With the stain of rampant corruption and racialized scandal tainting City Hall and turning local governance into one of the most disgraceful episodes in City of Angels history, it’s time for charter commission members to lead Los Angeles into a new chapter.
(Steven Hill (www.Steven-Hill.com) is co-founder of FairVote and author of “10 Steps to Repair American Democracy,” among other books.)
