This election was a vivid reminder of how free and fair
elections are—and have been—critical to electing women to office, including the
judiciary. The 2026 blue
tsunami electing women in unprecedent numbers to governor, Congress, and
state and federal legislative office was driven by an anti-corruption philosophy—a
challenge to the corporate and government overreach of overentitled leaders at
the expense of individual rights and public welfare. That same motivation—women
taking on corruption and unethical governance—fueled the first wave women
electors and women candidates for public office at the turn of the twentieth
century. That early historic movement was fueled by the Progressive Era in
reaction to the excesses of the Gilded Age of millionaires and government
corruption.
Judge Florence Allen, the first woman elected to a general jurisdiction court of the Cuyahoga County (Cleveland) Court of Common Pleas in 1920 rode in on a similar wave of women voter’s challenge to the corrupt status quo. This result was enabled by the structural change of the newly ratified Nineteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution and progressive multi-candidate voting ballots, like ranked choice and proportional voting. The bipartisan support of the newly enfranchised women voters then implemented those systemic ideas and made all the difference to her election.
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| Swearing in Judge Florence Allen to the Cuyahoga County Court of Common Pleas, Jan. 1921, Western Reserve Historical Society, Cleveland, OH |
Nineteenth Amendment
The Nineteenth was ratified in late August 1920 when women won their federal constitutional grant of the vote without barriers based on sex. This status as electors thus was presumed to allow women to run for public office. However, many states interpreted the Nineteenth narrowly to apply only to the vote and continued to deny women the corollary elector rights of public office and jury service on grounds of originalism and coverture, all well documented in Paula Monopoli’s book, Constitutional Orphan.
Days after enactment of the Nineteenth Amendment, Florence
Allen declared her candidacy for judicial office. She had missed the primaries,
so she ran as an independent, thereby attracting the support of active women
from both parties. Her own Democratic party did not endorse her, but behind the
scenes the political bosses in Cleveland, including one of the first women
shadow bosses, Bernice Pyke, buoyed her candidacy.
Voting Reform
A second critical systemic change that facilitated the election of the first woman judge was a Progressive movement for “proportional representation” voting. Allen came in first from a ballot of ten vying for four judicial positions.
These progressive voting reforms
allowed a voter to select several from a group of candidates, sometimes in
ranked choice, which often resulted in the election of more representative and
diverse candidates like women and minorities. Cleveland and Ohio emerged as
early leaders in the national movement for proportional representation reform.
Ashtabula, just east of Cleveland . . . was the first city in the country to
adopt proportional representation in 1915. Nationally, from 1913 to 1932, the
Proportional Representation League “pursued a vigorous national campaign” for
proportional voting, believing that it restored voting to ordinary people, as
opposed to corruption funding single winner take-all candidates.
Multiple-candidate voting also allowed voters to strategize by not voting all
their possible choices, thus increasing the total number of votes for preferred
candidates and decreasing the totals for other candidates.
Allen candidly admitted that this
strategy of withholding votes, colloquially called “plunker voting,” explained
her victory. She recounted a conversation she had after her election at a
luncheon with Roscoe Pound, her infamous professor at Chicago and now dean of
Harvard Law, who was giving a speech about his study of criminal justice
administration in the Cleveland courts. She introduced herself by saying, “You
will not remember me,” and he said snarkily, “I remember you perfectly: you’re
Miss Allen.” Another lawyer jumped in to mediate, saying this is Judge Allen, a
presiding judge in the court of common pleas. Pound said, “Oh! You’re the
woman! Plunker votes, I fancy,” thus discounting her elective victory. But
Florence ignored the slight. “I had to laugh at this. Unquestionably so-called
plunker votes had aided me to lead the ticket. Persons who voted for me and for
no one else on the list of ten candidates had deprived other candidates of
possible votes.”
Women activists led the movement for proportional voting and city manager governance in Cleveland. The progressive women idealistically believed that women candidates would benefit from these proportional voting reforms because women were a “numerical majority but drastically underrepresented in political life.” First Woman Judge, 66-67.
Judge Allen ratified this form of multi-candidate form of voting in her very first published majority opinion as a state supreme court judge. She relied on expansive home rule powers of municipalities newly added to the state constitution to uphold the constitutionality of proportional voting. Reutener v. City of Cleveland 141 N.E. 27 (Ohio 1923).
Allen said it was the “first decision
in the United States” to uphold “the radically different system of voting and
counting,” which was technically true, though Michigan and California courts
had reached similar results. In her opinion, she dismissed arguments that the
voting system nullified votes, finding that it is “axiomatic” and “a matter of
common knowledge” that minorities can determine outcomes, citing John Quincy
Adams’s presidential election and the common practice of gerrymandering voting
districts. In a companion case, she also upheld proportional voting against
federal constitutional challenge. Cleveland’s proportional voting, however,
would be repealed ten years later as wins by Italian and Irish candidates in
Cleveland drew public ire, and as Democratic reformers became the majority
party and lost interest in systemic reforms. First Woman Judge, 67-68.
In 2026, Ohio passed a law prohibiting any city from adopting alternative voting systems like ranked choice voting, in direct contravention of Allen’s precedent of the constitutional right to home rule. Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine Signs Bill to Crack Down on Ranked Choice Voting. For multi-candidate forms of balloting continue to be an effective structure facilitating the election of more diverse and representative candidates. While these voting reforms continue to be unpopular, and misunderstood, across the political spectrum, they have been effective in states like Alaska and Maine and other cities across the nation to open electoral politics democratically. Perhaps the most famous example is Mary Peltola’s prior congressional wins in Alaska, and likely 2026 win.
--Tracy Thomas
