Rhode Island election rules crush the competition. Here’s what can be done about it.

This carries genuine costs. Research shows that real party competition — between organized parties, not just personalities — changes how officeholders govern. University of Illinois economist Dan Bernhardt and colleagues have modeled a “party competition effect”: an incumbent who knows a credible challenger could emerge from an opposing party has a stronger incentive to govern from the center, benefiting voters of every stripe. Remove that threat, and the discipline disappears. Lee Drutman, a senior fellow at New America, adds that healthy parties do work no candidate can replicate alone — aggregating preferences, vetting candidates, mobilizing turnout — work that does not happen where only one party organizes locally.

How municipalities apportion their councils is partly to blame. In towns with councils apportioned at-large — i.e., townwide — winner-take-all voting enables a single party to capture every seat, even without an outright majority of registered voters, simply because its candidates finish ahead in every contest. Under this system, once a party loses enough, it simply stops trying. In Providence and Warwick, the mechanism is geographic: single-member wards sort voters into slices of the city, so whichever party dominates a neighborhood wins that ward automatically, and the general election becomes a formality decided in the majority party’s primary. Pawtucket’s single-member and at-large hybrid apportionment compounds the problem. Different mechanics, same effect: a minority party with real support has no realistic path to a seat.

For the at-large towns, the fix does not require abandoning at-large elections — only changing how the vote choice in at-large elections is structured. Limited voting gives each voter fewer votes than there are seats — three votes for five seats, say — so a single party cannot “sweep” the council. Jurisdictions that moved to limited voting saw minority party candidacies and wins increase, according to a study by University of North Carolina at Charlotte political scientists Theodore S. Arrington and Gerald L. Ingalls. Limited nominations cap the number of candidates any one party may nominate, so a dominant party cannot legally claim every seat. 

Pennsylvania and Connecticut have used these systems for over a century and half a century, respectively, and still deliver minority-party seats in lopsided years. Philadelphia caps party nominees for its seven at-large seats at five and limits voters to casting five votes, guaranteeing Republicans at least two regardless of the citywide gap. Connecticut’s limited nominations statute caps the number of candidates each party may nominate to a majority of seats, ensuring bipartisan representation on municipal boards. Cumulative voting assigns voters as many votes as seats. Voters may then allocate votes to one candidate or among several candidates, letting a minority party aggregate votes behind a single candidate or several candidates. These systems are perfectly constitutional and have withstood repeated Equal Protection challenges.

Providence and Warwick require a different fix since their problem is geographic sorting as well as bloc voting. Both cities could amend their home rule charters to reapportion their councils into multi-member districts — e.g., five three-member wards in Providence and three three-member wards in Warwick — and conduct their elections under limited nominations, limited voting, or cumulative voting systems. Proportionally elected, multi-member districts produce representation closer to a group’s actual electoral share than single-member or at-large districts manage alone, Todd Donovan and Heather Smith of the Washington State Policy Institute have found.

None of this requires Rhode Island communities to give up familiar governmental structures. At-large towns can keep electing councils at-large; district-based cities can keep wards tied to neighborhoods. What changes are the voting and nominating rules — rules that, elsewhere, have turned uncontested elections into contested ones.

Getting there is a matter for the General Assembly. Rhode Island’s election code — the rules for how municipal votes are cast and counted and how candidates qualify for the ballot — is set out in Title 17 of the Rhode Island General Laws. Limited voting, limited nominations, and cumulative voting would have to be written into Title 17, whether as a statewide option, a pilot program for interested municipalities, or a direct mandate like Connecticut’s minority-representation statute. This is an easier lift than it sounds: The General Assembly would be importing election rules with a record of surviving legal challenges and delivering results.

The question is not whether competitive local elections are possible in Rhode Island. It is whether the General Assembly is willing to amend Title 17 to make competitive local elections the rule rather than the exception.

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