Beyond the Mainstream: Cambridge's

Forty-two years ago, the city of New York conducted its last election under the voting system known as proportional representation.

The city of Cincinnati, Ohio scrapped the innovative voting system a few years later. As did the city of Worcester, Mass. In fact, since the 1940s, every American city that has adopted the highly-touted system for ensuring minority representation has repealed it.

EXCEPT Cambridge.

With the exception of New York City's community school board elections, Cambridge is the only municipal government in the U.S. to use proportional representation--typically known as PR, according to the New York-based Institute of Public Administration.

In this era of exit polls and televised results, city residents still watch officials spend more than a week counting their preferential ballots to determine the outcome of City Council and School Committee contests.

IN theory, PR is designed to make sure the fringe gets a voice in situations where traditional voting methods split two parties along a few mainstream issues. In Cambridge, candidates only need to receive support from one-ninth of the electorate, rather than a majority.

Although several systems of voting--including those used in most European countries--are a form of PR, the variant that American cities have historically used is the one Cambridge employs--the single transferable ballot.

Under this system, candidates for council and school committee do not represent a specific district but are elected at large, Voters rank candidates in order of preference--first choice, second choice, and so on.

When votes are counted, candidates with more than a specific quota are declared elected. Election officials then look at the candidate's "surplus"--the number of votes in excess of the quota--and "transfer" them to the next choice.

If no one is above the quota, election officials transfer the votes of those candidates with the lowest number. This process repeats itself until the proper number of candidates is elected.

PR arrived in Cambridge in 1941, carried in by a wave of good-government reform and prompted by a scandal that nearly bankrupted the city and sent the mayor to jail.

At that time, the new Plan E charter stripped the mayor and City Council of almost all executive power, vesting it in the city manager, to be appointed by the council. The old voting system of wards and precincts was revamped and replaced with PR.

Many large industrial cities--where machine politics, patronage and one party rule were the norm--instituted such changes, hoping to ensure that everyone got a voice in government.

"It basically was a real good-government thing," says Paige E. Bigelow of the Institute of Public Administration. "It basically meant that every person's vote really did count--that every member of the electorate had a person whom they really did vote for."

But although the PR system has withstood several challenges at the polls over the last 48 years, people in Cambridge still grumble about it from time to time.

One of their chief complaints is that "proportional representation" is really "perpetual representation": Sitting councillors almost always win. Critics of PR point to the most recent council election in 1987, when nine incumbents sought re-election, and nine incumbents won.

Others argue that PR does not really provide for minority representation. Although the system was designed to loosen the hold political parties have on government, many city residents argue that here, a two-party system has simply adapted itself to PR.

The City Council has been split for decades between two distinct groups. On the current council, four members are endorsed by the liberal Cambridge Civic Association (CCA), the good-government group that originally backed Plan E. The other five bill themselves as Independents.

"It doesn't seem to make a hell of a lot of difference whether we have [PR] or not," says tenant activist William B. Cunningham. "If it's supposed to give minority representation, it doesn't, because we basically have a two-party system."

In recent years, rent control has been the dividing line between the two. CCA candidates back the existing rent control system, while Independents--with the crucial exception of Mayor Alfred E. Vellucci--want to weaken it.

But today's race may mark the beginning of the end for the CCA Independents split. Fringe groups on both sides have formed new organizations this year with slates of candidates to counter the CCA's established one.

On the left, the grassroots Working Committee for a Cambridge Rainbow has endorsed a platform calling for a radical overhaul of city government.

On the right, a coalition of Independent council hopefuls have joined with Councillor William H. Walsh to form the "Today's Independents" slate. The slate's members are unified by their support of Proposition 1-2-3, a ballot referendum that would drastically alter rent control.

The slate's formation also splits the Independents into at least two other groups: old-line Independents like Councillors Walter J. Sullivan and Thomas W. Danehy, who base their support on neighborhoods, and protenant candidates like Timothy J. Toomey, Jr., who support rent control and oppose 1-2-3.

ACCORDING to the most recent census, Blacks constituted 10.9 percent of the city's population in 1980--slightly less than one-ninth.