SASS Lunch - Alternative Representational Systems for LA

Los Angeles recently convened a Charter Reform Commission to evaluate alternative methods for selecting its leaders. The Commission has recommended ranked-choice voting and an expansion of the City Council, with voters likely to weigh in on these reforms in November.

Join us for lunch to hear Claremont McKenna’s Evan Rosenman, Assistant Professor of Statistics, and Sarah Cannon, Associate Professor of Mathematics and Computer Science discuss their effort to develop a data-driven framework to evaluate proposed reforms, focusing on proportionality, racial representation, and electoral responsiveness. Their approach - A Statistical Study of Alternative Representational Systems for the LA City Council - integrated tools from Statistics and Computer Science, including Bayesian ethnicity imputation, ecological inference, and graph-based sampling algorithms to explore the space of possible districting plans.

They presented their work to the Commission in October 2025, advocating for adoption of proportional ranked-choice voting (PRCV) in multimember districts. And while the Commission did not adopt the proposal, their findings suggest PRCV offers the strongest gains in minority representation. More broadly, their work highlights how computational and statistical methods can clarify tradeoffs in electoral system design.