Cumulative voting

Cumulative voting (also accumulation voting, weighted voting or multi-voting) is a multiple-winner voting method intended to promote more proportional representation than winner-take-all elections.

Cumulative voting is used frequently in corporate governance, where it is mandated by some (7) U.S. states.(See e.g., Minn. Stat. Sec. 302A.111 subd. 2(d).) It was used to elect the Illinois House of Representatives from 1870 until its repeal in 1980 and used in England in the late 19th century to elect some school boards. As of March 2012, more than fifty communities in the United States use cumulative voting, all resulting from cases brought under the National Voting Rights Act of 1965. Among them are Peoria, Illinois for half of its city council, Chilton County, Alabama for its county council and school board, and Amarillo, Texas, for its school board and College Board of Regents. Courts sometimes mandate its use as a remedy in lawsuits brought under the Voting Rights Act in the United States; an example of this occurred in 2009 in Port Chester, New York, which had its first cumulative voting elections for its Board of Trustees in 2010.

A form of cumulative voting has been used by group facilitators as a method to collectively prioritize options, for example ideas generated from a brainstorming session within a workshop. This approach is described as “multi-voting” and was likely derived from the nominal group technique and is one of many tools suggested within the Six Sigma business management strategy.

A cumulative voting election permits voters in an election for more than one seat to put more than one vote on a preferred candidate. When voters in the minority concentrate their votes in this way, it increases their chances of obtaining representation in a legislative body. This is different from bloc voting, where a voter may not vote more than once for any candidate, and 51% of voters can control 100% of representation.

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