X-Nico

unusual facts about Plurality-at-large voting


Robert Stewart Sparks

Sparks was out of the council for two years, but in 1925 he returned as the first person to represent the 5th District under the new city charter, which replaced the former at-large election system with one based on single-member constituencies.


Al-Marri v. Spagone

Judge Diana Gribbon Motz wrote the plurality opinion, which held that, as a legal resident of the United States who was originally detained within the United States, al-Marri may not be held in military custody as an enemy combatant.

Allyson Schwartz

Pittsburgh-area U.S. Congressman Ron Klink won the crowded, six-candidate Democratic primary with a plurality of 41% of the vote.

American Communications Association v. Douds

Chief Justice Fred M. Vinson wrote the plurality decision for the majority, joined by Associate Justices Stanley Forman Reed and Harold Hitz Burton.

Azores regional election, 1996

The winner of the election was the Socialist Party which, for the first time received a plurality of the public vote, although they obtained a comparable number of representatives in the Regional Assembly.

Brett Hulsey

Hulsey was elected to the Wisconsin State Assembly's 77th district in 2010 to succeed fellow Democrat Spencer Black, receiving a plurality of 12,138 votes to 7,761 for Green Ben Manski, 4,666 for Republican David Redick, and 372 for David Olson of the Constitution Party.

Cartesian oval

An account of his results, titled On the description of oval curves, and those having a plurality of foci, was written by J.D. Forbes and presented to the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 1846, when Maxwell was at the young age of 14 (almost 15).

Chantal Rossi

Denis Coderre was elected as mayor of Montreal in this election, and his party won a plurality of seats on council.

Daniel Dahm

Until 2007 he was fellow at the Natural History Museum London towards the interplay of diversity and plurality of life and its complexity.

Deanery synod

In England its lay members also elect the deanery's lay representatives to its diocese's synod (every three years by either plurality or STV) and its diocese's members of the House of Laity in the General Synod of the Church of England, every five years by a system of Single Transferable Vote.

Elliott Danforth

The Republican candidate Gilbert A. Deane had received 78 votes more than Democrat Edward B. Osborne, but the Board changed 92 votes and declared Osborne elected by a plurality of 14.

Ellis County, Kansas

Ellis County gave a plurality to Bill Clinton over Bush and Ross Perot in the 1992 presidential election, but has been in the Republican column in each of the past four elections, giving 66 percent to Republican John McCain to 32 percent for Democrat Barack Obama in the 2008 election, higher than the 57 percent McCain won statewide.

Extraterrestrials in fiction

Camille Flammarion (1842-1925) who lived in a time where biological science had made further progress, made speculation about how life could have evolved on other planets in works such as La pluralité des mondes habités (The Plurality of Inhabited Worlds) (1862) and Recits de L'Infini(1872), translated as Stories of Infinity in 1873.

George P. Smith

Smith first ran for election to the Alberta Legislature in the 1909 Alberta general election winning the new Camrose district with a comfortable plurality.

Gordon Kesler

Harry Alger from the Progressive Conservatives defeated him with a five thousand vote plurality.

Harry B. Chase

Chase ran for a second term in office in the 2008 Alberta general election, he was re-elected holding the electoral district with a comfortable plurality.

Henry B. Atkins

He won the vacant Didsbury electoral district, defeating W.L. Tolton of the Conservative Party by a plurality of 150 votes.

Inter arma enim silent leges

In 2004, Justice Antonin Scalia used this phrase to decry the plurality decision in Hamdi v. Rumsfeld which in his view, upheld the detention of a U.S. citizen as an enemy combatant, without charge or suspension of the habeas corpus.

James Yancy Callahan

In 1896, Callahan was nominated for Congressional delegate from Oklahoma Territory, and was elected by a plurality of less than fifteen hundred, running on the Free Silver ticket to the 55th United States Congress.

Jim Pankiw

He won a plurality of just 220 votes over Dennis Gruending of the New Democratic Party.

John R. McLeod

He was elected to a term in the Alberta Legislature in the 1905 Alberta general election with a 110 vote plurality over Conservative candidate John Jackson.

Jules Bailey

In 2008, Bailey earned a plurality victory over three other candidates for the Democratic nomination for House District 42 for the seat vacated by Diane Rosenbaum, who was running for election to the Oregon Senate, and then defeated Pacific Green Party candidate Chris Extine by a wide margin to win election to the seat.

Ken Hechler

This time, he won the Democratic primary by a plurality, but lost the general election to Republican Betty Ireland.

News Corporation takeover bid for BSkyB

On 4 November 2010 Business Secretary Vince Cable referred the takeover bid to Ofcom to consider issues of media plurality.

Patrick H. Kelly

In 1962, Kelly was himself defeated in a six-way Democratic primary, coming in second to 20-year-old college student Fred Kessler, who took a plurality with 38% of the vote, and went on to defeat Republican Herbert Smith in the general election.

Politics of Poland

The Senate (Senat) has 100 members elected for a four-year term in 40 multi-seat constituencies under a rare plurality bloc voting method where several candidates with the highest support are elected from each electorate.

President of Emilia-Romagna

Originally appointed by the Regional Council of Emilia-Romagna, since 1995 de facto and 2000 de jure, he is elected by popular vote every five years under universal suffrage: the candidate who receives a plurality of votes, is elected.

Real and Smooth

On 11 October 2012, The Secretary of State Maria Miller announced Global Radio's takeover of GMG Radio would not be investigated on the grounds of plurality.

Unified Primary

The Frohnmayer brothers are sons of former Oregon public official Dave Frohnmayer, whose plurality loss to Governor Barbara Roberts in Oregon's 1990 gubernatorial election was blamed in part on an independent candidate in the race who siphoned off conservative votes.

United States presidential election in California, 1968

This is the last presidential election where the Republican candidate carried Santa Cruz County by a majority of the popular vote, although Republicans in the elections of 1972 and 1980 carried the county by plurality.

United States v. Kincade

The plurality rejects the dissent's argument that this sets into motion an Orwellian 1984 scenario where everyone could potentially be required to submit to a DNA test.

Vote splitting

Runoff voting methods are less vulnerable to vote splitting compared to plurality voting.

William R. Moser

Moser obtained a plurality in a four-way Democratic primary election against Assemblyman Cecil B. Brown, former Assemblyman John Schaller, and Brown Deer village trustee Fred W. Voigt; and was unopposed in the general election.


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