Kirkwood’s Strange Electoral System

On April 2nd, Kirkwood residents will have the opportunity to elect four council members and a new Mayor. Over the next month, I’ll have plenty of coverage of the candidates for those positions, but this week I wanted to take a step back and look at the distinct electoral process by which that new five-person majority will be elected.

First though (to whet your political appetite), a couple of weeks back, I had the opportunity to moderate Kirkwood for Everyone’s Candidate Forum on the candidates’ views on transportation and housing, and I think it turned out really well! The recording of that forum is now available, so if you didn’t get the chance to attend in person, make sure to check it out:

Okay, back to the process! Let’s start with a brief overview of the system we currently have.

The Status Quo

Kirkwood’s Mayor and Council members are both elected in a “non-partisan, at-large, first-past-the-post” system. Let’s quickly run through those terms: “Non-partisan” simply means that candidates do not run on a particular political party’s line, and there are, therefore, no primaries, just an open general election. The “At-large” portion of the description means that all seven members are elected by all of Kirkwood to represent all of Kirkwood, rather than representing specific wards or districts of the city. “First-past-the-post” means that the candidate with the most votes (or second or third or fourth most votes, depending on how many spots are available on the Council) is elected.

Usually City Council elections are staggered, with three council members and the Mayor elected in the spring of presidential election years (like 2024), and the three remaining Council seats elected in the spring of Midterm years (2026). In this year’s election, however, there’s an added wrinkle: Because Wallace Ward resigned from the Council with two years left in his term, we will elect his replacement in April as well. This brings the total number of seats up for grabs from the typical three council seats and the Mayor to four council seats and the Mayor. Whichever of the Council candidates finishes in fourth place will be elected to Ward’s truncated two-year term rather than the full four years earned by the top three candidates, and by 2026, we should be back to the normal schedule.

Finally, both the Council Members and the Mayor are limited to two consecutive terms in their respective offices. At the end of those eight years, they have to sit out the two years until the next election before they can run for the same position again. Because “Mayor” and “City Council Member” are considered two distinct positions, theoretically, after serving eight years as one (as Mayor Griffin just did), you could simply run for the other and never have to sit out.

First/second/third/fourth-past-the-post plus at-large representation plus our hybrid term-limit system is a very unique electoral setup, so let’s take a look at the system’s advantages and disadvantages, and then wrap up with some of the ways we might improve.

Benefits of At-Large Representation

Our at-large representation is an immensely positive aspect of our system in that it rewards town-wide decision-making rather than parochial NIMBYism.

Think briefly about some of the locally unappealing but broadly necessary aspects of government: waste management, sheltering the homeless, incarcerating criminals, or new development. Those things have to go somewhere, but for rather obvious reasons, everyone would prefer they not be in their specific neighborhood. In ward or district-based representative systems, the alderman’s entire electoral prospects are based on their ability to block these uses from coming to the neighborhoods they represent and instead ensure they go elsewhere so that their constituents get all of the benefits but bear none of the cost. This leads to some obvious collective action problems because, again, these facilities have to go somewhere for a city to function. Representing the city as a whole means that our representatives can make decisions that are best for the city as a whole. There’s no one else to pass the buck to.

The Minority Representation Problem

The central problem with any at-large electoral system, including ours, though, is the potential for such a system to give rise to a tyranny of the majority: How do we ensure minority groups aren’t steam-rolled time again by elected officials who can win by ignoring their concerns and instead catering to the preferences of the rest of the electorate.

The most obvious local example is Meacham Park: a more than 90% Black island in a community that is more than 90% white overall. Under Kirkwood’s at-large system, such a neighborhood could potentially be left holding the bag as elected officials try to cater to the rest of Kirkwood with a “we’ll just stick Meacham with the trash dump/affordable housing/homeless shelter/drug treatment facility” agenda.

Now, luckily, we live in a time and place where elected officials would likely be penalized if they said something as explicitly racist as this out loud, and the residents of Meacham have also done a great job of voting in such a way to ensure the neighborhood has been represented by at least one council-member for much of its post-Kirkwood annexation history, but the problem is still there. We have previously looked at numerous examples of the City ignoring Meacham-specific concerns, and since Wallace Ward’s retirement last year, the neighborhood has been left without a representative on City Council, a problem that does not look likely to resolve itself soon as none of the candidates in the April election claim the neighborhood as home.

Unintended Consequences of First-Past-the-Post

The other primary problem with our current system is that it makes it very difficult for voters to communicate their preferences effectively. Because candidates are elected based purely on their raw vote total, voters face the prospect of accidentally hurting the candidate they most prefer.

If your favorite City Council candidate in the upcoming election is Meacham Park’s Paul Ward (who is not running, this is just an example), you’re obviously going to vote for him, but then the question becomes what to do with the rest of your three votes. You could cast them in favor of your second, third, and fourth favorite candidate, but those candidates are also running against Ward! If Ward comes in fifth, losing to your fourth favorite candidate by one vote, you’ll feel awfully silly. You could, of course, vote for just Ward and not use your other three slots, but then you’re sacrificing your ability to shape the rest of the council in any way. It’s really hard to know how to vote rationally.

Four Ways We Can Improve

So how can we keep the benefits of our current at-large system while improving the minority representation of places like Meacham and ensuring voter preferences are fairly represented? Well, there are a couple of tweaks we can make.

1. Proportional Ranked Choice Voting

The optimal voting system for Kirkwood is probably something like Proportional Ranked Choice Voting (PRCV). PRVC would allow citizens to rank their preference for City Council candidates from first to last, with candidates elected based on how many people prefer them to the remaining options. The exact mechanics are a little complicated to explain in writing, but the website fairvote.org has a great demonstration of how such a system would work.

The big problem with PRCV is that it might be difficult and expensive to administer given that the St. Louis County Board of Election would have to figure out how to print ballots and count votes for an entirely new system that would apply to just one of the 88 municipalities within its jurisdiction.

Just for fun though, I’ve set up a City Council mock election to demonstrate just how such a system would work this cycle! So click here and rank your preferred candidates for Council from 1-6 (Out of curiosity, I’ve also added a Mayoral poll for you to fill out despite the fact that ranked-choice isn’t really applicable in a two-person race). Then, in next Thursday’s newsletter, I’ll publish the results of the first inaugural Gadfly Readers straw poll!

2. Cumulative Voting

A perhaps administratively simpler (if not quite as efficient) version of PRCV would be something called “Cumulative Voting,” which is most often utilized for corporate boards, but also has been used for municipal elections in places like Peoria, Illinois. Cumulative voting grants voters the same number of votes as there are open spots (this year, everyone would get four council votes). Voters are free to use those votes however they’d like, including casting multiple votes for the same candidate.

Such a system would boost minority representation on the Council as groups that strongly prefer one candidate over all the rest could express that preference with multiple votes (Meacham residents could cast all four votes for Paul Ward, for example). But much like our current system, it would still leave voters guessing what the best strategy might be given their preferences. You want to cast as many votes for Ward as he needs to win, but you also don’t want to waste any extra votes on Ward that you might otherwise cast in favor of your second choice, so you’re left guessing exactly how many votes you need to give Ward for him to win: One? Two? Three? All four? Proportional Ranked Choice Voting eliminates this problem, so it should still be our north star, but cumulative voting might represent a more feasible step in the right direction in the interim.

3. Repeal Term Limits

The final tweak we should consider is the abolishment of the term limits that are currently in place. Now this suggestion is likely to be unpopular —polling shows that most people really really like term limits— but the overwhelming consensus in the political science research is that limits are a bad idea for a few reasons.

The first is that term limits are, at a high level, anti-democratic. If most people think a given candidate is the best person to represent them on the council, that person should be allowed to represent them. If most people stop thinking a person is their best representative, then we already have a solution for that: You vote them out!

Second, term limits force out our most experienced politicians and contribute to less competitive elections. Knowledge of the relevant issues and their constituencies is developed over time; if we force the people who are most knowledgeable about them, it stands to reason that we will be left with less-versed leadership. This is especially true given the small nature of the pool of candidates we’re pulling from. If people are eager to run for office, we should let them. Letting them do so should reduce the number of uncontested elections and give voters more say at the ballot box. Speaking of making our elections more competitive…

4. Pay the Council More

We should also pay the Council and Mayor more. Council Members receive $2,400 yearly, while the Mayor gets $3,600. When you consider the time commitment required to serve on the council, it seems obvious that a higher level of compensation would help to expand the candidate pool to a broader swath of Kirkwood citizens. Even a marginal increase to the $4,800 for Council Members and $7,500 for Mayor amounts that were recommended by Webster’s Charter Review Advisory Board last fall would help to do things like cover babysitter expenses for single parents who might want to run. If we want Kirkwood to be a diverse place, we need leadership with a diverse set of life experiences; that means finding ways to expand the candidate pool beyond the empty-nest retirees that currently fill the ranks.

How We Make the Change

So how would we make these changes? Well, the first three proposals pertain to what’s known as The Charter, essentially Kirkwood’s version of the Constitution, so the most straightforward way would probably be to first commission a Charter Review Advisory Board to study any potential changes and then offer recommendations to the City Council. The council would then need a simple majority to pass an ordinance putting any proposed changes before the voters at the next municipal election. If a simple majority approved a given amendment, the charter revision would go into effect. If the Council didn’t want to play ball, the general public could also initiate such changes themselves by filing a petition for any such amendment with the signatures of 10% of Kirkwood’s voters. If successful, the proposed amendment would again go before the voters where it would need a simple majority to go into effect.

City Council and Mayoral compensation are not outlined in the Charter but rather the more general code of ordinances, so changes here are a little easier. The Council would simply need to vote in favor of such a change which would then go into effect after each of those council members/the mayor’s next election. Obviously, the electoral incentives are a little perverse here (voters might not look kindly on council members giving themselves a raise), so here, too, the best bet might be a citizen-led ballot initiative, except the charter specifically states that “The initiative power shall not extend to any ordinance relating to salaries of city officers or employees” Maybe a Charter Revision Advisory Board should take a look at that too.