Cincinnati's History of Using Proportional Representation
Theodore Berry and Full Representation
Cincinnati's 1994 Champion of Democracy
By Bill Collins
During the 1947 municipal election, 42-year-old Theodore M. Berry began his public role as a key supporter of proportional representation (PR) in Cincinnati. That year, the Hamilton County Republican organization gathered enough signatures to place a measure on the ballot to repeal the preference voting system that had been used to elect the city council for the previous 20 years.
Berry ran for council as an independent. The only other black candidate, incumbent Republican Jesse Locker, took a neutral position on the repeal. In failed attempts by the Republican machine to repeal preference in 1937 and 1939, the black community in fact had voted strongly for repeal.
Once Berry entered the debate, black opposition to preference voting began to change. In his campaign, Berry explained that while blacks had been able to win representation on the Cincinnati council as far back as 1931 under preference voting, no blacks had ever been elected to Detroit's city council -- a city with a much larger black population, but with a winner-take-all, at-large election system.
Berry wrote that preference voting gave the black community the balance of power in city hall. "The politicians know this and want to destroy [our] bargaining power and control the Negro vote. We have only received recognition when it was forced from the political bosses. . . Without PR our jobs, businesses, unions, homes and community welfare would be controlled by political bosses. . . I [will] seek to prove that a minority group representative can be an instrument for the welfare of the community rather than a tool for partisan interests."
Although Berry narrowly lost his bid for council, preference voting was retained, Councilman Locker was re-elected and preference voting received half of the black community vote. In 1949, Locker was re-elected, and Berry won a seat on council as an endorsed candidate of the Charter Committee of Greater Cincinnati. The black community -- then just 15.5% of Cincinnati's population -- held 22% of council seats under preference voting.
Berry served on council until 1957, when Republicans and some Democrats joined to repeal preference voting. They warned voters that Berry would become mayor under preference voting.
In 1993 court testimony, Berry described the 1957 attack on preference voting. He testified, "I am persuaded in my own mind that the primary motivation to each effort to repeal PR, beginning in 1936, was motivated by the desire and intention to dilute the impact of a mobilized and organized black vote." After preference voting was repealed in 1957, no blacks were elected to council until 1963. Berry moved to Washington, D.C. from 1965 to 1970 to take a position in the administration of President Lyndon Johnson. Later, after returning to Cincinnati, he served as mayor from 1972 until 1975.
In 1986, Berry helped revive preference voting in Cincinnati. That year he was invited by the Hamilton County Rainbow Coalition to debate the merits of preference voting and district elections.
After the debate the Coalition decided to lead an initiative campaign to return preference voting to Cincinnati. That effort brought preference voting to the ballot in November 1988 -- the first Cincinnati preference voting referendum since 1957. The issue was approved in more than half of the city's wards, but a higher turnout in anti-preference voting wards defeated the measure citywide. Preference voting supporters brought the issue to the ballot again in 1991 and again won about two-thirds of the vote in the black community and 45% of the vote citywide.
In 1992, Berry gave the keynote speech at the founding national conference of the Center for Voting and Democracy (then Citizens for Proportional Representation). In 1993, he jumped back into the fray again, when he and other minority preference voting supporters petitioned a U.S. District Court to intervene in a voting rights case against Cincinnati's at-large council voting system, which was upheld before the intervention was considered.
In March 1995, Berry once again testified on behalf of preference voting before a Cincinnati charter commission with John Gilligan, who had served Cincinnati in Congress, as governor and as a council member with Berry in the 1950s. Together Berry and Gilligan made an impressive argument for preference voting's fundamental fairness.
Bill Collins is a founding member of the Center for Voting and Democracy and Cincinnati resident.
Early American Adoptions of Proportional Representation
The Rise and Fall of a City Reform Movement
By Kathleen L. Barber
In the early 1900s, particularly from 1913 to 1932, the Proportional Representation League pursued a vigorous campaign for the single transferable vote (e.g, preference voting) form of proportional representation elections. Its staff traveled the country to testify, exhort, write PR charter provisions, provide expert advice on the conduct of PR elections and defend existing PR systems under attack in repeal referenda.
By 1926, several renowned reformers had joined the PR League's council, including historian Arthur N. Holcombe of Harvard and economist Paul H. Douglas of the University of Chicago, journalist Walter Lippman, suffragists Carrie Chapman Catt and Belle Sherwin (the first and second presidents of the National League of Women Voters) and U.S. Senators George W. Norris of Nebraska, Robert L. Owen of Oklahoma and George Wharton Pepper of Pennsylvania.
Ohio an Early Leader
In Ohio, PR ranked high on the agenda of Progressives along with such local priorities as the city manager plan, the municipal initiative, referendum and recall, the eight-hour day for city workers and municipal ownership of utilities.
As in the earlier battle for Home Rule in Ohio, independent Democrats and Republicans affiliated with the state's Progressive Party were leaders in the campaign for electoral reform. Toledo Mayor Brand Whitlock and Columbus city council member Washington Gladden continued to travel and exhort on behalf of the Progressive agenda.
They were joined in the fray by Democratic attorneys Florence Allen and Susan Rebhan of Cleveland, and by populist minister Herbert Bigelow and Democratic attorney Edward Alexander of Cincinnati, who held out successfully for proportional representation (PR) elections in exchange for supporting a small at-large council for their city. Anti-machine Republican leaders such as attorney Murray Seasongood, later mayor of Cincinnati, Agnes Hilton and Marietta Tawney of Cincinnati, campaigned both in their respective cities and in national forums for the adoption of PR.
Ohio was known as "a particular arena of struggle where the League of Women Voters was in the center of nearly every effort." Among women's clubs nationally, the Women's City Club of Cleveland and the Woman's City Club of Cincinnati were known for their skill in organizing workers to canvass for votes on behalf of new charters embodying the city manager plan and PR. With these local activists as known resources, it is not surprising that the national Proportional Representation League would pour its resources into winning over voters in Ohio.
Ashtabula was just one of many Ohio cities visited by the PR League's Clarence Hoag in the wake of the adoption of Home Rule, but there he met a sympathetic local labor leader, William E. Boynton, a railroad engineer and former city council president who invited him to return for further conversations with other leaders and eventually an appearance before the city charter commission. The seed planted by Hoag would grow by 1914 into the adoption of a new charter with the city manager plan, and by 1915 into the first American adoption of PR.
Adoptions followed in Boulder (1917), Kalamazoo (1918), and Sacramento and West Hartford (1921). Because these were relatively small cities, there was jubilation in the movement when Cleveland adopted PR elections with its new charter in 1921. Not only was Cleveland the largest city yet to try this electoral system, it was ethnically and religiously the most diverse -- "polyglot," in the reformers' terms. With favorable press emanating from Cleveland and intense intercity campaigning by reformers in Ohio, Cincinnati (1925), Hamilton (1926) and Toledo (1935) also adopted PR charters, as did nearby Wheeling, West Virginia (1935).
New York Adopts Proportional Representation
In 1936, over the strenuous opposition of the Tammany organization which had a virtual monopoly on council, the nation's largest city adopted PR. New York City was alone in adopting PR without the usual corollary feature of a city manager plan. The new charter and a separate issue providing for PR council elections carried all boroughs except Staten Island. Here in the 1930s the reform spirit, with its interest in changing political arrangements, persisted at the local level and blended into the national revival of the spirit of Progressivism in the New Deal.
PR did what it was supposed to do... Ethnic, religious and racial minorities, the partisan minority in single-party-dominant cities and, in many cases, women were elected to council seats for the first time. These results may not have been well understood; in many cases they were not welcome.
It must have been more than coincidence that PR and a new city charter were adopted by the voters of New York City on the same ballot with their overwhelming election of Franklin D. Roosevelt for his second term as President. In the 1936 campaign, the Democratic city organization warmly supported Roosevelt and stridently opposed both PR and the new charter. Proportional representation had been presented to the voters as a separate issue, lest it drag the charter down to defeat, but the voters swept both local innovations to success along with their presidential preference....
Loss of Proportional Representation in Most Cities
During the Great Depression, however, the PR League was struck by declining financial support. Lack of funds forced the Proportional Representation League to merge into the National Municipal League in 1932, and its continuing efforts were conducted by volunteers. Still the innovation continued to spread. By 1964, 160 PR elections had been held in the United States, including 37 school board elections in Massachusetts cities....
The municipal referendum, however -- itself a Progressive reform tool to expand popular participation in government -- became a formidable weapon in the hands of PR's opponents. Forty-nine repeal issues were placed on the ballots of American PR cities between 1920 and 1961, with several cities experiencing several referenda; 21 cities ultimately repealed PR.
No single factor adequately explains the wave of repeals by popular vote.... In Cleveland, it was voted out as a corollary of rejection of the city manager plan. PR opponents generally attributed the losses to the complexity of the PR count and its time-consuming character. Proponents blamed the continuing opposition of machine politicians who had lost power in reformed cities and sought to recover it....
Although repeal votes have been attributed to a changing political climate less friendly to experimentation and reform, the use of PR was still spreading during the period of repeals. The last two successful repeal votes did not occur until 1960 (in Hamilton, Ohio and Worcester, Massachusetts). Cambridge (Mass.) voters defeated four repeal referenda, the latest in 1961, and the city continues to practice PR today, over 50 years after its adoption. These are instances of the Progressive influence still at work at state and local levels among the forces of organized labor, urban Democrats and Independents, Independent Republicans, social workers and champions of public power, all of whom were among the persistent advocates of PR....
A Victim of Its Success
It would seem that the search for explanations of repeal must be conducted in the context of particular cities and their social and economic development. Yet an underlying explanation for repeal seldom recognized in the literature is the fact that PR did what it was supposed to do -- that is, facilitate the representation of minorities of various sorts.
Ethnic, religious and racial minorities, the partisan minority in single-party-dominant cities and, in many cases, women were elected to council seats for the first time. These results may not have been well understood; in many cases they were not welcome in the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s. The election of two Communist Party members in New York City in 1945, and of African Americans in Toledo and Cincinnati, figured prominently in repeal campaigns. The history of the repeal campaigns shows that voters generally were not as open to diversity as PR's sponsors had been.
This article is excerpted and adapted from Kathleen Barber's Proportional Representation and Election Reform in Ohio (Ohio State University Press, 1995), which focuses on the use of PR in five Ohio cities. Dr. Barber is professor emerita of John Carroll University and a founding Advisory Board member of the Center for Voting and Democracy.
Historic Quotes
"The people of Cincinnati can be grateful for proportional representation. It enables them to vote with the certain knowledge that their ballots count, and count for some candidate who needs those particular votes. It gives us a council fairly divided between parties, and well balanced as among racial, religious and economic groupings. It is the fairest system of voting yet devised for the choice of a body of representative public officers. Wise citizens will not be misled by false charges that PR is unfair or impractical."
Cincinnati Enquirer editorial, 1935
"PR could be viewed as a compromise between 9X and single-member district elections. The election would still be conducted at-large, enabling constituencies from the whole city to come together to choose their council members. At the same time, minorities -- whether partisan, racial, ethnic or ideological -- could win their fair share of participation in the policy debate. The majority would rule, but not without input from the diversity of viewpoints and people in the city."
Kathleen Barber, John Carroll University, 1993
"Proportional Representation is the shield and the essence of the charter."
Murray Seasongood, Mayor of Cincinnati 1926-1930
