Methods

I’m considering a large “What If?” here. What if the Rhode Island General Assembly had been elected a different way for the last six elections? Therefore it’s necessary to explain how I got my results.

Using data from the Board of Elections, I totaled the votes cast across all races for each chamber in a specific election. I used two spreadsheets, one for the Senate and one for the House. The Board of Elections tends to have reasonably high-quality data; going back to 1996 it marks candidates with a political party even if said party failed to reach Rhode Island’s 5% threshold for recognition. Thus we can see who ran as under the banner of the Green Party, the Libertarian Party, the Cool Moose Party, etc. In the case of multiple independents in the same race, I totaled the votes cast for all independent candidates.

There were a couple of cases where I was unable to determine political parties and marked them instead as “independent”. One was a race where the Board of Elections listed Aram Garabedian as “YIM” and the other was Robert Venturini’s 2010 run for Lieutenant Governor which the Board of Election listed as “HWB”.

After determining the totals, I removed the votes cast for the independents and write-ins. In the worst case (the 2010 Senate elections) this resulted in the loss of 10.66% of the votes. In the best case, (the 2006 House elections) this resulted in a loss of 0.19% of the votes. It should also be noted that the amount of write-ins were not available in all years. I did this because it is impossible to guess how an independent voter or someone who exercised the write-in option might cast their ballot if they had to pick a party.

Afterwards, the remaining partisan votes were added into spreadsheets and the D’Hondt method was applied to figure out the apportionment of seats. I also figured out the percent of the partisan vote that

In the case of Sen. Edward O’Neill, the only independent member of the General Assembly over the last six elections, I assigned Sen. O’Neill as an overhang seat. Thus, from 2008 to 2012, the Senate elects 77 senators instead of the 76 it elects from 2002 to 2006.

This is Part 3 of the MMP RI series, which posits what Rhode Island’s political landscape would look like if we had switched to a mixed-member proportional representation (MMP) system in 2002. Part 2 (a retrospective of the last six election) is available here. Part 4 is a look at the Election of 2002.