Montgomery County comes across as a progressive jurisdiction that promotes equality of opportunity and access to all its residents. To some extent that is true: all of our elected leaders and their constituents place racial and gender equality as a primary objective, and for that we should be very proud.
However, when it comes to voting rights, Montgomery County is as much a violator as the memorable party-boss jurisdictions in New York, Kansas City, and Chicago. How does this happen?
Most people are aware of gerrymandering: the practice of diluting a particular demographic’s voting strength by dividing it among another demographic. Maryland’s congressional districts are notoriously gerrymandered, as are those in North Carolina, West Virginia, and Kentucky. State legislatures use gerrymandering to dilute the voting power of Party A, guaranteeing a win for Party B.
Equally invidious is at-large (multi-member) representation. Since the first congressional elections in 1788, it has been proven time and again that in at-large elections, a particular demographic elects all the winners. For example, twenty candidates—ten from Party A, ten from Party B—are running for election in a multi-member jurisdiction. If 60% of the jurisdiction’s voters are loyal to Party A, and 40% are loyal to Party B, all of Party A’s candidates win 60% of the vote, meaning Party A elects 100% of the winners even though it contributes only 60% of the votes. (For the best explanation of the at-large voting rights violation, see The Bias of At-Large Elections: How it Works.)
At-large voter dilution is so blatant that all civil rights activists denounce it. In the many voting rights cases that came before the Supreme Court, justices on the right and left, from Sandra Day O’Connor to Ruth Bader Ginsberg, always excoriated this practice. Thurgood Marshall called at-large representation a “right to cast a meaningless ballot.” Civil rights leader John Lewis compared it to “literacy tests.” Everyone votes in at-large elections, but few people actually elect the winners.
How does at-large representation affect Montgomery County’s residents? From 1986 until 2022, the County Council had nine members, four of them (!) elected at-large. Starting in 2022, the Council has eleven members, four of them still (!) elected at-large. The implication is that a small number of voters elect four members of the County Council.
We can easily identify the winners and the losers in these elections. Since 1986, voters north of Shady Grove Road and Glenmont have consistently contributed one-third of the votes cast, enough to justify at least one at-large member of the county council. However, in all that time, only one resident from that area has been elected as an at-large member (Laurie-Anne Sayles in 2022, after serving on the Gaithersburg city council which is also elected entirely at-large). Clearly, we see that the down-county voters, and more specifically those living within the Beltway, enjoy electing all four members of the at-large contingent, as well as electing their own direct representative. The at-large voting gives this constituency an exclusionary influence in policy and budget allocations.
Coupled with the discriminatory nature of at-large voting is the nature of MoCo’s primary elections. Given the preponderance of voters registered as Democrat and Independent, since 1986 the winner of a Democratic primary automatically wins the contest in the general election. The disturbing results from all the at-large primaries is that in no case did any at-large member secure more than 19% of the vote, which means only 19% of the Democratic voters decided all the at-large winners. Fully 81% of the Democratic voters would have preferred to see someone else sitting on the County Council!
What benefits do down-county residents manage to accrue with their disproportional representation? A quick look at the infrastructure map gives tells us that all of the Metro stops start and end between Shady Grove and Glenmont; up-county residents have no quick access to Metro stops. In fact, the last Metro stop built in Montgomery County was in 1998. With no-one to represent them, up-county residents have been locked out of Metro access, while Northern Virginia stamps out Metro stops like Hershey’s Kisses. What’s worse, every single stop on MoCo’s segment of the Purple Line is below the Beltway, precisely where the at-large representatives and their voters live. And what’s really worse, the County Council has refused to give up-county any relief in traffic by denying them the Mid-County Connector; that critical infrastructure isn’t part of any down-county priority, so why bother?
Another example of the discrimination the at-large representation causes is playing out right now in the traffic relief debate. There are no jobs in Montgomery County, so almost all of us need to find employment elsewhere. With their metro stops and proximity to DC and Northern Virginia, down-county residents have the shortest commute patterns. Up-county residents have no Metro, so they are stuck in soul-breaking traffic jams along the I-270 and American Legion Bridge. The only relief for them is to either recruit large-scale employers (which down-county residents oppose) or to expand the highways (which down-county residents also oppose). Because the down-county residents use the at-large contingent to get their way, they condemn up-county residents to long commutes. That’s not discrimination—that’s heartless.
What is a way out of this exclusion and discrimination? Whenever the Supreme Court finds a jurisdiction such as Montgomery County in violation of voting rights laws, they impose single-member districts. In our case, a remediation to the discrimination is eleven single-member districts instead of the current seven single-member and four at-large. Another approach, preferred by many voting rights activists, is to keep the current hybrid representation, but elect the at-large contingent using proportional or ranked-choice voting. This arrangement mitigates the distortion of a 19% plurality electing a winner. Ranked choice voting has gained traction in the English-speaking world (Alaska, Maine, New Zealand, Ireland, Australia), and would be a viable reform for us. For an excellent explanation, see Ranked Choice Voting.
Until there is reform in our County Council’s elections, we can expect only continued favoritism, exclusion, and discrimination used by a minority against a majority.
