Should Illinois Voters Reconsider Cumulative Voting for State Legislators?

Alan Ehrenhalt over at Governing Magazine wrote a brief but interesting history of how state legislatures have evolved. He describes how state legislatures accepted foundation money to professionalize their state legislatures, which entailed longer sessions, additional staff, and higher legislative salaries. 

All of that began to change in the 1960s and even more in the 1970s. One reason was the end of population gerrymandering, as decreed by the U.S. Supreme Court. But an even more important reason was the movement to reform and professionalize legislatures, promoted and largely financed by the Ford Foundation. 

Ford believed that state governments were too antiquated and too secretive to play the role required of them in a changing political system. The foundation supported annual legislative sessions, enhanced staffing and technical capacity, and far greater transparency in communicating with the public. The reformers also called for higher salaries to reflect the new level of responsibility that state legislators should be taking on. 

By 1980, many of the largest states had essentially bought into the reform model. Legislatures in California, Illinois, New York, Pennsylvania and a handful of other places were meeting through most of the year, hiring professional staff to manage much of the workload and ramping up legislators’ pay significantly.

Ehrenhalt describes the reforms as attracting independent, reform-minded legislators that, to reference Wilford Brimley's portrayal of the Postmaster General in a Seinfield episode, "by God got things done!"

If the reformed legislature imposed a financial sacrifice among its participants in many states, it also offered them policymaking opportunities that had not existed in the old days. Most of the new members elected in the early reform years of the 1970s and 1980s were self-starters. They weren’t eased into political service by local power brokers, as their predecessors had been. When they arrived in office, most of them wanted to make a splash right away, and a remarkable number of them did. Minnesota, Wisconsin and progressive-leaning states around the country enacted long lists of legislative initiatives in these years. They imposed new regulations on corporate business and dramatically expanded the social service benefits available to lower-income citizens. Being a legislator in the reform years meant accepting a financial squeeze, but for the politically ambitious, it could be a lot of fun.

But this era of legislative accomplishment (cue the Jaws music) was soon curtailed by the reassertion of power and prerogative by legislative leaders:

But the reform era slowly petered out in the 1990s. States’ legislative leaders began reclaiming the influence that they had lost over the preceding decades. They raised leadership PAC funds to recruit favored candidates in competitive districts, and maintained an influence over these new recruits once the legislative sessions convened. They began showing less tolerance for the mavericks and individualists who had acquired a substantial amount of power in the early reform years.

Perhaps even more important, legislative politics started to take on a sharper partisan cast than had been the case before.

And that's really too bad. I've been lobbying for 15 years and have only been exposed to the "state legislature as dysfunctional Congress" model. I've talked to many who interacted with the General Assembly during the 1970s and have found those folks to be quite nostalgic about how the General Assembly functioned before Illinois' last major legislative reform, the "cutback amendment," was approved in 1980.

The cutback amendment changed the composition of the General Assembly by ending cumulative voting. Cumulative voting provided for the election of three representatives per House district. It also became possible for legislators from a minority party to pick-up one of the three seats in a district that tilted toward the opposing party. This permitted republican voters in democratic districts to have their views represented, and vice-versa. I'm told that legislators had much more independence in those days and were largely free of the kind of political pressure that legislative leaders wield today.

There have been efforts to reintroduce cumulative voting back into Illinois legislative politics. Some even contend that cumulative voting would increase the representation of racial minorities in the General Assembly. It will be interesting to see if those desiring change in the General Assembly will revisit the concept, particularly after hitting a brick wall on the constitutionality of term limits. At the very least, it would be fascinating (if you're a political junkie) to witness a renewed debate about which system of electing legislators is more meritorious.