City Council candidate ROBERT LA TREMOUILLE squats among the white geese that he has worked for years to protect. He is one of 19 Cambridge residents who have announced their candidacy to date.

A geese activist who says that city and state agencies have conspired to murder his fowl friends.

A neighborhood leader who organized the charge against a tunnel Harvard hoped to build under a busy city street.

A lifelong liberal who began her political career in the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party and who wants to spread the wealth of Cambridge’s universities to the city’s struggling unemployed.

These are just a few of the 10 outsiders who have announced that they hope to gain a seat in Cambridge’s hall of power, the Cambridge City Council.

Since Tuesday—the first day that nomination forms could be submitted—candidates have been registering in droves.

All of the current councillors are expected to run again, toughening the odds against outsiders.

But this year’s upstarts—like every crop of challengers in the city council election—have at least a fighting chance.

Under Cambridge’s electoral system, a candidate must win just one-tenth of the votes to win.

This means that, in a city of about 100,000 people, a candidate had to win just 1,670 votes in order to win a seat on the council in 2001.

According to local political pundit Robert Winters, Cambridge is the only city in the entire country that still uses the so-called “proportional representation” (PR) voting system, which is specifically designed to allow smaller political parties and interest groups to gain a voice in local government.

“It’s sort of an oddity that we’re the only city in America that still uses it,” Winters says.

But the system is one of the “purest” forms of democracy, he adds. The PR system has historically attracted dark horse candidates and long shots—from hard-core Libertarians to members of the Green Party—who want to gain a toehold on the mainstream, as well as long-time denizens of the neighborhood-based politics in the People’s Republic of Cambridge.

In the PR form of democracy, every kind of candidate—and every kind of platform—get their day in the sun.

Save the Geese

One of the 10 challenger candidates, Robert LaTrémouille, surveys the sloping riverside clearing, sparsely vegetated and concealed from the Memorial Drive traffic above. He squints one cobalt eye and stares with the other at the patch of river showing through waterside foliage. His jaw is set hard.