On Election Day, Cincinnati voters will decide whether to adopt Proportional Representation (PR), designated Issue 8, for electing Council Members. This is a very bad idea and should be defeated. Among many reasons to vote NO:

• The PR system proposed for Cincinnati gives voters 1 vote, rather than the current 9 votes. This means that while you may think more than 1 council member is doing a good job, or that you may like more than 1 new candidate, you will only get to record 1 vote from your ballot.
• The way this system works means that your 1 vote is transferred to the candidate that it will help the most -- your choice of any specific candidates may not count at all It will cost City taxpayers as much as $3 million to pay for the complicated new voting equipment and technology if approved. According to the Board of Elections, these expenses will be legally required and could force the City to cut services or raise property taxes.
• PR is expensive PR implementation would lead to confusion, since the new provisions in the Charter would be in effect for the 2009 Council election but development and certification of the computer system required to implement the system would take 18-36 months. If passed, neither voters nor officials will know what election format to use in 2009.
• PR is very complicated for the voter to understand, with 4 pages of voter instructions, which will undoubtedly lead to voter confusion as well as Florida-style lawsuits and claims of votes not being counted. We do not need negative national attention about lawsuits over confusing Cincinnati's election system.
• PR requires a lengthy and complicated set of rules to determine how to count ballots. Two pages of single-spaced instructions are to be added to the City's Charter just to instruct those counting ballots in how to do their job – as but one example:
• "If the result is not a whole number, take the next lower whole number as the new basis, and repeat the foregoing process, taking multiples of the basic number on remaining ballots until the surplus is exhausted; but whenever this number or its multiple is the number of a ballot already taken, take the next following numbered remaining ballot instead; and if any of the ballots so taken is not transferred to another candidate who does not already have a quota, return it to the credit of the candidate whose surplus is being transferred. If this procedure still does not produce enough transferable ballots to exhaust the surplus, determine another basis of selection by dividing the remaining surplus into the total first choice votes of the candidate, and proceed again in the manner last provided in this paragraph, and repeat this procedure as many times as may be necessary to exhaust the surplus."
• PR will lead to chaos at City Hall, because it rewards candidates who take extreme positions representing narrow special interests, and encourages Council in-fighting and negative campaigns in order to be ranked #1 by some voters. The return of narrow, extreme Council members comes at a time when the chaos is gone from City Hall and Council and the Mayor are working cooperatively to improve the City.
• This proportional representation system is not used in any major City in the country – currently, only 1 city in the United States (Cambridge, MA) with a population less than a third of that of Cincinnati, uses this PR system. Making a move to PR is risky.
• Mayor Mark Mallory, all current members of Cincinnati City Council, and the local Democratic & Republican Parties, oppose Issue 8 because it takes away your right to vote, is complicated and expensive.