Strategic Voting in Worcester At-Large Elections
and "How Worcester's Mayor is Like the Queen"
two articles excerpted from Happiness Pony
Strategic Voting
by Mike Benedetti and Greg Opperman
We are emotional creatures. There’s nothing wrong with voting your heart. And while the chance your vote influences the outcome of an election is very low, the chance your vote influences your heart or your personal relationships is pretty high.
That said, sometimes you want to do a cold-blooded analysis of things. From that perspective, how should you vote in Worcester at-large elections? Should you “bullet vote?” Should you skip for-sure winners or losers? Let’s get into it.
In Worcester City Council at-large elections, each voter can vote for up to 6 candidates, and the top 6 vote getters win seats. Voting only once is called “bullet voting,” and voting for fewer than 6 is a mild form of bullet voting.
How powerful is this?
If you only care about one candidate, bullet voting is your best option. Mike ran a computer simulation of a theoretical (but not at all realistic) situation where 12 candidates are running for 6 seats, all of them equally likely to win. In this scenario, you bullet voting for only candidate X is 80% more likely to be a tie-breaker for that candidate than if you voted for X and also used the 5 other slots on your ballot. In the real world, bullet voting is probably less powerful: candidates are unlikely to be so evenly matched, so you are much less likely to be a tie-breaker. And “80% greater than extraordinarily small” is still extraordinarily small.
In practice, it can be hard to figure out what to do if you’re invested in multiple candidates’ success or failure. In that case, whether you should bullet vote is entirely dependent on your feelings about the candidates, and their chances of winning.
For candidates you think are guaranteed to win or lose, your vote has very little value.
For close races, the best strategy depends on who is running and how many seats you think they are competing for.
If there are open seats for all the candidates you love, vote for the candidates you love.
If multiple candidates you love are in a tight race against each other, and nobody you hate or don’t care about is competitive, you might want to bullet vote your favorite. The least likely scenario, but one of the stronger ones for a bullet vote.
If there are more open seats than candidates you love, this is where having predictive information is valuable! If a candidate you love, a neutral candidate, and one you hate are competitive for what you think are 2 open seats, vote for your top 2. If they’re running for one seat, bullet vote the one you love. We think voting for a neutral candidate against one you hate, in a tight race, is higher value than voting for a candidate you love who’s a lock. However, this isn’t a good strategy in large groups; if everyone did this, the neutral candidate would beat the one you support.
What about the 2023 Worcester City Council at-large race? Even though there are 11 candidates running for 6 seats, it would be more realistic to think of it as 6 candidates running for 1 seat, or maybe 7 running for 2, because a bunch of candidates are pretty much a lock for the other seats. Greg’s analysis of historical election data found that most candidates get a surprisingly consistent number of votes year to year. So he took a weighted average of the votes they’ve gotten in past elections, and ran some simulations with a range of two standard deviations. (Note that this is based entirely on past elections, and ignores all of the real-world factors of 2023.) The long-term incumbents (Petty, Toomey, King, and Bergman) are practically sure-things, all winning in 95%+ of scenarios. Nguyen, for whom we have less data, wins in 86% of scenarios, and Colorio in 79%. It's worth noting that in the last election, Bergman, Colorio, and Nguyen were only separated by fewer than 100 votes, so if any one underperforms, there could be a major shakeup. Optimistically, Coleman and Creamer each have a 2-4% chance of winning. We have no relevant data about the other three challengers, so for the simulation they were assigned random but equal chances for an upset, but in practical terms it would be a long shot for even one to win.
If you want to vote strategically, if you like Nguyen, Colorio, Morales, Perrone, or Hampton-Dance, probably keeping them on your ballot makes sense (to the extent that voting makes any sense at all). If you’re trying to figure out which candidates you like should be left off your strategic ballot, it should probably be any of the people who are a lock, or the two who have very little chance.
How Worcester’s Mayor Is Like the Queen
by Nicole Apostola, from the May 2011 issue of Happiness Pony
Worcester has a modified Plan E form of government—our chief executive is the (unelected) City Manager; the Mayor is nothing more than the head of our legislature, the City Council. Worcesterites affectionately call this the “Weak Mayor” form of government. We’ve had this form or government for over 60 years, though every ten years or so Worcesterites get restless with the status quo and toy with the idea of “charter change,” imagining that a “Strong Mayor” would be an improvement. Here are some typical reasons offered for such change:
Accountability. Electing a leader would mean that the chief executive would be accountable to voters on a regular basis.
Effectiveness. There are a significant number of people who look at the career of Providence’s Buddy Cianci not as a cautionary tale of corruption but as an example of a person who gets things done.
Leadership. What the Buddy Cianci fans are really pointing to is a sense of leadership. A City Manager just manages city operations with some input/direction from the City Council. A strong Mayor would have much more freedom to direct the city according to his own vision.
Those content to leave Plan E in place feel:
A strong Mayor form of government might politicize city government. One of the reasons Worcester moved to a City Manager was to avoid political appointments and to have a professional administrator running the city.
An apathetic electorate, few of whom vote regularly, effectively negate the benefit of electing the administrator. We could end up with a ten-term Mayor who is just as unaccountable as an unelected City Manager.
Our two-year election cycle is too short for the administrator of a city. A strong Mayor who spends half his time scheming for the next election with feel-good projects isn’t an effective administrator.
These are just a few points raised by both sides of the “charter change” divide. That we revisit this topic so often could indicate a lack of institutional memory, or perhaps just a stubborn Yankee sense that things might possibly work better if we get under the hood & tinker a bit.
The Weak Mayors of Worcester’s Current Charter
Jordan Levy 1988–1993
Raymond Mariano 1994–2001
Timothy Murray 2002–2006
Konstantina Lukes 2007–2009
Joseph C. O’Brien 2010–2011
Joe Petty 2012–present
Our “current charter” includes both District Councilors and direct election of the Mayor.
