At-large is a designation for members of a governing body who are elected or
appointed to represent the whole membership of the body, rather than a
subset of that membership. At-large voting is in contrast to voting by
electoral districts. If an at-large election is called to
choose a single candidate, a single-winner voting system must
necessarily be used. If a group of seats must be covered, many electoral systems
can be possible, from proportional representation methods to block voting.
Canada A number of municipalities in Canada
elect part or all of their city councils at-large. Although this form of
municipal election is most common in small towns due to the difficulty of
dividing the municipality into wards, several larger cities use an at-large
system as well: North Bay, Ontario
Portage la Prairie, Manitoba St. Albert, Alberta
Thunder Bay, Ontario Timmins, Ontario
Vancouver, British Columbia. Most of British Columbia's major cities,
including Victoria, Surrey and Richmond use this system.
At the federal level, Canada's three territories, Yukon, Nunavut and the
Northwest Territories are each represented in the Parliament of Canada
by one at-large Member of Parliament and one at-large Senator. However, all
Canadian provinces, regardless of size, are divided into multiple electoral
districts. Israel
In Israel, elections for the Knesset are conducted on an at-large basis by
proportional representation from party lists.
Netherlands In the Netherlands, elections for the
States-General are conducted on an at-large basis by proportional
representation from party lists. Philippines
In Philippine politics, "at-large" usually refers to the manner of election
of the Senate: the voters have twelve votes, with the country acting as one
at-large "district", the twelve candidates with the most number of votes
are elected. Provinces that send only one
representative to the House of Representatives are called "lone
districts". All local legislatures elect member via at-large districts via
plurality-at-large voting. Sangguniang Kabataan, Sangguniang Barangay Council),
Sangguniang Bayan and some Sangguniang Panlungsod all elect members with each
local government unit acting as one at-large district. Some City Councils
and all Sangguniang Panlalawigan members are elected with the city or province
being split into as much as seven districts, then each district elects at
least two members, at-large. United States
Article One of the United States Constitution provides for direct
election of members of the House of Representatives. A congressional act
passed in 1967, 2 U.S.C. § 2c, dictates that representatives must be elected
from geographical districts and that these must be single-member districts,
except when the state has a single representative, in which case one
at-large representative is elected from the entire state.
= States with at-large congressional districts=
= Former at-large congressional districts=
= Non-voting at-large congressional districts=
American Samoa American Virgin Islands
District of Columbia Guam
Puerto Rico Northern Mariana Islands
= Former non-voting at-large congressional districts=
= States with both at-large seats and geographically defined districts=
This is a table of every instance of at-large representation in the United
States Congress when the same state had geographically defined districts as
well. = Local elections=
Since passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and lessening of some historic
barriers to voter registration and voting, legal challenges have been made
based on at-large election schemes at the county or city level, including in
school board elections, in numerous jurisdictions where minorities had been
effectively excluded from representation on local councils or boards. An example
is Charleston County, South Carolina, which was sued in 2001 and reached a
settlement in 2004. Its county commission changed to nine members
elected from single-member districts; in 2015 they included six white Republicans
and three African-American Democrats, where the black minority makes up more
than one-third of the population. In another instance, in 2013 Fayette
County, Georgia, which had an estimated 70% white majority and 20% black
minority, was ordered by a federal district court to develop single-member
districts for election of members to its county council and its school board. Due
to at-large voting, African Americans had been unable to elect any candidate
of their choice to either of these boards for decades. Such local election
systems have become subject to litigation, since enabling more
representative elections can created entry points for minorities and women
into the political system, as well as providing more representative
government. In the late 1980s, several major cities in Tennessee reached
settlement in court cases to adopt single-member districts in order to
enable minorities to elect candidates of their choice to city councils; they had
previously been excluded by at-large voting favoring the majority population.
By 2015, voters in two of these cities had elected women mayors who had gotten
their start in being elected to the city council from single-member districts.
See also General ticket
Plural district United States Statutes at Large
Further reading Martis, Kenneth C.. The Historical Atlas
of United States Congressional Districts. New York: Macmillan
Publishing Company. References
External links U.S. House of Representatives: House
History