I f the problem is that a small number of people are going out to the polls and actually choosing the government, the solution should be to increase voter turnout across the board.

I am hearing conflicting voices - some people claim that students are overrepresented, while others are claiming that because students are NOT voting in large numbers, it is the non-student members of the student-heavy wards who are being overrepresented. Which is it? If it's the latter (which seems more in keeping with the documented tales of low voter turnout in the campus PRECINCTS) then it should be asked, would the silent part of the ward really vote all that differently from the louder part of the ward that is getting the "overrepresentation"? Dunno.

Either way, if a ward has a silent population such that the "loud other half" of the ward is getting their voice to "count for more," then the solution is canvas that ward hard and get those silent members out to vote, so that we can hear THEIR voices.

The solution is NOT to add at-large members, who will simply be elected by the most active, loud voters from across the entire city. Doing that only gives the people who are already voting even MORE of a loud voice! You are proposing making up for the "silent" people in ward X with entirely different "loud" voices from wards Y and Z.

If the loud people in ward X need their voices evened out, it must be by getting the silents in ward X to speak up, not giving people in wards Y and Z "equivalent extra representation".

As for the argument that the population on the south side of the city is increasing rapidly, so what? Representation is based on the population, not the rate of change of the population, and it is not permitted to "project" populations into the future to try and draw a map that is designed for two years from now. If the change is truly rapid, perhaps the city might undertake extra censuses so that the maps are updated every 5 years rather than 10, but the maps must be drawn from actual measures and not projections. Either way, the south side is not the only area increasing in population - like it or not, there are several "mega" apartment complexes going up on the west side of Urbana, and there are plans for projects in downtown Urbana as well (although, as Stone Creek has proven, one can never tell if these things are going to pan out).

Finally, I thought Danielle Chynoweth had a quite relevant final question - where the heck did the "two" come from? Why not go to an all at-large system, or one at large, or three? If we're going there, why not abolish the entire thing and have a purely proportional representation system? There are interesting arguments to be had about all of those schemes, but they weren't brought up, and none of it was written down. I suspect someone looked at Champaign with its three at large seats and thought, "well, Urbana is kinda 2/3 the size of Champaign, so let's go for two" but who knows. Nobody knows, that's who, and that's the problem.