At large (before a noun: at-large) is a description for members of a governing body who are elected or appointed to represent a whole membership or population (notably a city, county, state, province, nation, club or association), rather than a subset.
It is commonly used when making or highlighting a direct contrast with subdivided equivalents that may be past or present, or seen in exotic comparators.
An exception is a nil-exceptions arrangement of overlapping tiers (resembling or being district and regional representatives, one set of which is at large) for return to the very same chamber, and consequent issue of multiple ballots for plural voting to every voter.
(In the past, single transferable voting (STV) was used in 20 Canadian municipalities, either in at-large contests or multi-member wards.)
[citation needed] In Israel, elections for the Knesset (the national parliament) are conducted at large by proportional representation from party lists.
This was due to the 1964 case of Reynolds v. Sims: the United States Supreme Court determined that the general basis of apportionment must be "one person, one vote.
[8] In 2018, West Virginia passed a law switching all remaining multi-winner House of Delegates seats to single-winner districts following the 2020 United States Census.
[9] 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.
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.
Due to at-large voting, African Americans had been unable to elect any candidate of their choice to either of these boards for decades.
In the late 1980s, several major cities in Tennessee reached settlement in court cases to adopt single-member districts to enable minorities to elect candidates of their choice to city councils, who had previously been excluded by at-large voting favoring the majority population.
The town of Islip, New York was sued by four residents in 2018 for violating the Voting Rights Act by maintaining a discriminatory at-large council system.
For example, the California Voting Rights Act removes one of the criteria required for a successful federal Voting Rights Act challenge, which has thus resulted in hundreds of cities, school districts, and special districts moving to single member area-based elections.
The solution adopted by Cambridge, Massachusetts in 1941 was to elect all council officials via Ranked-choice proportional representation, Single transferable voting.