LA City Council Reform: A Statistical Study of Alternatives (Evan Rosenman & Sarah Cannon, Claremont McKenna College)

Abstract:

The 2022 Los Angeles City Council scandal intensified public demand for governance reform, leading to the creation of the Los Angeles Charter Reform Commission. The commission is now considering proposals from civic and academic groups. Major recommendations include: eliminating the automatic election of candidates who win a primary majority, expanding the size of the City Council, and adopting alternative electoral systems such as multimember districts and ranked-choice voting.

This project offers a rigorous, data-driven evaluation of these proposals, focusing on their implications for proportionality, racial representation, and electoral responsiveness. We combine methods from Statistics and Computer Science, including Bayesian ethnicity imputation, ecological inference, and advanced graph-sampling algorithms to explore district boundaries. This hybrid approach provides new insights into Los Angeles’s political geography and the challenges of building a fair, representative City Council. By providing empirical evidence on the strengths and weaknesses of various districting systems, our work aims to inform policymaking and advance democratic representation in Los Angeles.