Under proportional representation, voters do not choose only one candidate. Rather, they order the candidates by numerical preference. Candidates must reach a certain quota of votes to win. Ballots of losing candidates, starting from the bottom, are redistributed until nine winners are produced.
When a seat is vacated, the departing councillor's ballots--those ballots that marked him or her first preference, and ballots transferred from losing candidates--are redistributed. This last happened in 1985, when Mayor Leonard Russell died in office.
Since 1941, Cambridge has used proportional representation to elect the nine city council and six school committee positions. It is the only city in the United States to use proportional representation for both bodies.
McSweeney said he was the favorite of most Walsh voters. The 31-year-old employee-benefits specialist has failed twice in getting the courts to declare him the winner or to order a recounting of all the ballots from the election, not just Walsh's.
"We have asked two things all along that Mr. McSweeney be appointed as the 10th-place winner, or that the unallocated, 'exhausted' ballots, not just Mr. Walsh's, be counted," said Dennis J. Newman '72, McSweeney's attorney. "If Walsh had never run and if you re-plugged his votes back into the election system, I'd be in the council and Mr. Galluccio wouldn't," McSweeney said yesterday. "Or re-run the election as if Walsh wasn't there, I would have won easily."
"I was defeated by a flawed system, and [Galluccio] happened to benefit by it," McSweeney added. "It's not representative of the people."
McSweeney will appear before Associate Justice Herbert P. Wilkins '51 in a hearing today to prevent the oath of office from being administered, Newman said. Galluccio, aide to state Sen. Robert D. Wetmore (D-Barre) and a night student at Suffolk University Law School, said he was hopeful McSweeney's court challenge would fail. "I hope the [SJC] will hold the lower courts' decisions and that the [swearing-in] will go forward as planned," he said in an interview yesterday