Statement IN FAVOR by Carl R
Comrades, I urge you to vote FOR this amendment. Our current delegate election system allows candidates without meaningful support across the chapter to enter our delegation to the national convention. This reform would better serve proportionality while also protecting our delegation from incredibly unpopular candidates being elected by gaming the system.
Statement IN FAVOR by Ben D
I am writing to urge comrades to vote YES on Amendment 1 to our standing rules. Fairly simply, this reflects proportionality better, and works more how the DSA bylaws mandate by emulating the Hare method of STV. This would ensure that candidates actually reach the minimum threshold of support laid out by STV in order to be elected. STV was designed for elections of 3-6 candidates, so elections for 51 delegates positions like this mean both large numbers of wasted ballots (artificially lowering the threshold) and a very small threshold in the first place. This amendment is more in line with how proportional voting works around the world and what the creators of STV and the authors of the DSA bylaws had in mind.
Statement AGAINST by Alex Y
This is a half baked proposal that fundamentally misunderstands Ranked Choice Voting and how it works. This Frankenstein combination sidesteps the democratic vote process of Ranked Choice Voting to cherry pick people who already showed broad enough support to get nominated and subject them to a second round of voting with the confusing and worse voting system of Approval voting. This combination will prove to only add more confusion to the voting process and this amendment should be seen as way to poison the original resolution by just making it worse so that the current system we use sounds more reasonable than this if this amendment gets passed. It should not be surprising that something so illogical would come from an amendment with only one sponsor on it. This is an individual’s hair-brained scheme to fix a problem that doesn’t exist and won’t exist. We should not entertain the flawed ideas of individuals no matter the intention behind them if it makes things worse for the collective overall when all is said and done. I urge all who took the time to read this to vote against this amendment.
Statement IN FAVOR by Bakari W
The ability for a candidate to win under STV while getting fewer votes than the minimum quota is in my view a significant weakness of the system, and can result in STV selecting candidates that only have support from 5 or 6 people as opposed to candidates who are broadly supported. This amendment addresses that in a small way.
It’s also likely that as people get more and more used to the voting system and rank more people to avoid their ballot getting spoiled, more and more of the candidates will get elected by achieving the minimum quota. And when that happens it will mean this amendment won’t be triggered in the first place. So I encourage you to vote YES on this amendment.
Statement IN FAVOR by Zack T
STV is a major improvement to our delegate election process, it ensures that we send multi-tenancy delegations to national conventions that represent the diverse ideological tapestry of our chapter and increases voter participation in our election process. And this amendment would ensure that the true spirit of proportionality is enshrined in our STV system.
What do I mean by proportionality? In our June elections 439 individuals cast ballots to elect 46 delegates. Under STV that would mean the threshold to be elected delegate, either in the 1st round or subsequent rounds as votes get redistributed, would be set at 10 (or 1-46th of the vote). That makes perfect sense, a comrade who can convince 1/46 of the electorate to vote for them should be represented at our convention.
However, here is the problem with the current system: only 29 of 46 delegates reached 10 votes when the STV process ended, with some delegates being elected with as few as 6 votes, ⅓ less support than a single delegate’s proportional voting power. This is because under the flawed current rules the STV redistribution process halts when all but 46 candidates are eliminated, not when every candidate hits quota. The primary goal of this Amendment is to allow the STV process to play out to its logical conclusion, with as many candidates as possible reaching quota. If this amendment had been in place, 41 out of 46 candidates (90 percent) would have eventually reached quota, ensuring proportionality and a strong multi-tenancy delegation. The small number of remaining delegate seats would then be determined through an instant runoff, with all ballots cast retabulate and previously eliminated candidates with the highest number of rankings (thus demonstrating broad chapter support) filling out the remaining delegate seats.
Why is this change necessary? 1st it will further encourage more voter participation, as candidates can no longer rely on other people getting eliminated before them to secure a delegate position, they will need to go out to the membership to convince more people to turn up and vote. 2nd, the current system unfortunately allows for fringe non-representative candidates to take advantage of low voting thresholds in order to be elected as delegate. This was tragically evident this month when an elected delegate – who only won their seat with five votes + their own – felt entitled to hijack our general body meeting, called our presiding officer a “Bitch” multiple times, and used intimidation, threats, and baseless accusations to derail chapter business. Should our electoral system make it this easy for unhinged personalities with no respect for our chapter or our work to represent us at national convention? This amendment is a very modest proposal to make it so candidates need more than a handful of friends to win a spot as delegate. If you want to represent our chapter, you should at the very least get a proportional number of votes equivalent to the power of a delegate position, not sneak in through a backdoor loophole.
Vote YES for proportional elections
Vote YES for multi-tenancy delegations
Vote YES on Amendment 1
Statement IN FAVOR by Ken B
Greetings comrades. Many of you witnessed, either in person or on zoom, a member’s volatile outburst at our last General Body Meeting, which resulted in a significant disruption to the meeting and cost us valuable agenda time that could have been used to debate chapter business. This member was elected as a delegate to the 2025 National DSA Convention, and used their election in part to justify their disruption and flagrant disrespect for our democratic norms and principles. They were elected with only six number one ranks and received about 0.4 votes from transfers, far less than the Droop Quota of 10, but that was enough to put them above other chapter members, including many who are skilled organizers and broadly supported across the chapter, so they won despite this narrow base of support and little to no organizing experience in the chapter.
Under this amendment, they would have had to compete in a second round against other candidates who hadn’t made the quota, and candidates would be compared by the total number of ranks they got on any ballot. By this metric, the disruptive and volatile member would have fallen short, only being ranked on 14% of ballots. Comrades from all slates, as well as other independents, were ranked on a broader portion of ballots and would have been selected instead. The election of this member shows the danger of using a system where a small, loyal base is all that’s necessary for election, as they could easily have proved equally as disruptive, if not more so, at national convention as they were in our last GBM, had our Steering Committee not acted quickly to enforce discipline and ask the NPC to prevent them from attending.
In addition to preventing volatile, disruptive, and unpopular candidates who lack broad support in the chapter, this amendment would have the benefit of providing slates and independent candidates a clear incentive to rank each other to maximize their performance in the run off round. Currently, it matters very little who a voter ranks 37th, as voting power gets very diluted when you get that far down the ballot. This would provide a clear, significant benefit to being included on the lower end of someone’s ranking, which would incentivize collaboration and cooperation rather than polarization and division. I hope you will join me in voting for this amendment to strengthen our democracy and protect it from bad actors like the member who disrupted our last GBM and hurled personal abuse and profanity at our comrades.
Statement AGAINST by Dami O
This amendment makes it significantly harder to receive votes to be elected to the convention and encourages a system far more undemocratic than the system that we just participated in. The primary purpose of the STV system is to provide proportional representation through the exhaustion of votes. Raising the quota is against STV-Hare and is a whole different voting system entirely.
There were 46 seats where a majority of people met quota (51% approximately); therefore, I see very little purpose in a delegate election in trying to alter standing election rules to use some form of approval method, which in the context of our elections, has been proven to create very unrepresentative delegate results. Let’s not alter a working model of representation for something that is untested and is likely to lead to unrepresentative results.
Statement AGAINST by Sam D
Given the solo sponsor for this amendment, this amendment is a personal project that came out of the recent delegation elections. It destroys the base resolution and would prevent the chapter from adopting genuine ranked-choice Single Transferable Voting (STV). The main benefit of STV is that it grants proportional representation of candidates in an election. This is a good thing. As we saw with campaigns like Zohran Mamdani’s and the success of the I83 ranked-choice ballot in DC, we need to build cadre who know how to navigate the nuances of elections run with ranked-choice voting. That means cadre that know how to collaborate with other candidates as well as understanding their relationship to their base extremely well. Adopting STV in chapter elections will encourage us all to develop those skills. (Interested voters can read more in my recent Washington Socialist article about the delegate election or comrade Joe R’s in-depth article in I83.)
What this amendment offers instead is a watered down version of the “Approval–STV” that was recently the center of a credentials challenge for the LA chapter’s delegate election. It sneaks approval voting methods into our elections, to ensure disproportionate results. In addition, our election integrity and the work of our internal election departments would be challenged by the artisanal design this amendment would introduce. Let’s read the text of the amendment for when approval voting kicks in: “treating any ballot ranking a candidate in a position equal to or less than the number of delegates allocated to the chapter as a single vote.” That’s not even how approval voting works, where voters can approve of as many candidates on their ballot as they want. Does this make any sense? We should use proven voting methods, not passing fancies.
Statement AGAINST by Claudia S
Comrades, I urge you to vote no on Amendment GR07-A01. This amendment is not solving a material issue, but rather complicating a tested, democratic system of voting: STV. Our chapter’s 2025 National Convention delegate elections were held under STV as prescribed by DSA national. Our results were a delegation that proportionally represented the political tendencies of our diverse chapter. No need to reinvent the wheel or alter an effective system by incorporating components of Approval Voting, a far less democratic, first-past-the-post style.
Statement IN FAVOR by Nat S
I’m writing in support of Comrade Zachary’s amendment A01. Please vote for this amendment, which reduces the negative spoiler effects of STV when it comes to large elections.
It is important to me that the chapter’s election processes be representative of the chapter’s preferences. All voting methods have flaws. (A quick Wikipedia search on voting methods will show this!) The approval system we have used in the past, though it does not allow one to rank candidates by preference, does have important benefits for ensuring that delegates must appeal to a broad swath of the electorate, not just a small group of core supporters. And while Single Transferable Vote allows candidate ranking, its flaws are accentuated the further and deeper down the rankings we go – for those last few seats, the math of the voting system takes more and more influence. Just at the point of the ballot where the electorate’s preferences are most uncertain, under the math of STV those marginal preferences become deeply influential, and minoritarian candidates can get elected. This is especially true of delegate elections – having a lot of seats to fill means the math takes more and more influence, and minoritarian candidates get elected over ones supported by the majority due to strategic voting.* As the background to the amendment notes, this isn’t purely a theoretical impact of STV, it has already happened.
(*) Those interested can search “Center squeeze” on Wikipedia for research on this negative effect. I’ll quote briefly: “In a center squeeze, the majority-preferred and socially optimal candidate is eliminated in favor of a more extreme alternative … Candidates focused on appealing to a small base of core supporters can “squeeze” broadly-popular candidates trapped between them out of the race.”
The article goes on to state this is a recurring feature of ranked-choice voting methods (of which STV is one) and has been empirically observed around the world in a variety of contexts in which STV or other ranked-choice method is used.
Comrade Zachary’s amendment proposes a compromise which I believe is a valuable solution. STV contains a ‘quota’ of votes necessary to gain a seat, which is (number of total votes) divided by (number of available seats). The amendment would permit that those who meet this quota are elected, and any surplus votes redistributed as per STV. Once all possible candidates have met quota and been elected, this is where the change occurs. For the remaining seats – those that are unable to be filled by candidates who affirmatively met the STV quota – those seats will be filled by approval voting of the candidates who did not meet quota. This requires no additional ballots and is relatively easy to calculate. With this amendment, candidates who do not get elected through the STV quota will still need to be acceptable to the broader electorate.
I believe this compromise preserves the best of both worlds. We get the value of the proportional representation of STV, but we also ensure that all elected candidates, including those last few to get elected, are broadly acceptable to the chapter and not just a small minority. Especially when we are electing candidates to bodies such as a Steering Committee or national delegations, these qualities of working together and appealing to the whole chapter, not just a small group of supporters, are important. Under this amended system, I believe we will see much fewer situations where candidates are elected after only appealing to a small subset of the electorate. I urge everyone to support comrade Zachary’s amendment.
Statement IN FAVOR by Eduarda S
Comrades, I encourage everyone to vote YES on this amendment. The recently passed STV system is a good step toward proportional representation, but it isn’t working as intended. In 2025, several delegates were elected with far below a proportional share of the vote—some with under 7 votes out of 439. At the same time, candidates with broader support were eliminated early.
This amendment strengthens STV to ensure that delegates represent real coalitions within our chapter, not just small, concentrated voting blocs. It preserves multi-tendency representation while ensuring broad-base legitimacy.
Let’s continue to progress and make our elections truly democratic. Vote YES on this amendment.