defeated 61 percent to 39 percent. United States In the United States, the Proportional Representation League was founded in 1893 to promote STV, and their efforts resulted in its adoption by many city councils in the first half of the 20th century. More than twenty cities have used STV, including Cleveland, Cincinnati and New York City. As of January 2010, it is used to elect the city council and school committee in Cambridge, Massachusetts, the park board in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and the board of assessors in Arden, Delaware. STV has also been adopted for student government elections at several American universities, including Carnegie Mellon, MIT, Oberlin, Reed, UC Berkeley, UC Davis, Vassar, UCLA, Whitman, and UT Austin. The Fair Representation Act, introduced in Congress in June 2017, would establish STV for US House elections starting in 2022. List of users STV has seen its widest adoption in the English-speaking world. National legislatures The table below lists countries that use STV to fill a nationally elected legislative body by direct elections. Other bodies Indirect Historic use Benefits Advocates for STV argue it is an improvement over winner-take-all non-proportional voting systems such as first-past-the-post, where vote splits commonly result in a majority of voters electing no one and the successful candidate having support from just a minority of the district voters. STV prevents in most cases one party taking all the seats and in its thinning out of the candidates in the field prevents the election of an extreme candidate or party if it does not have enough overall general appeal. STV is the system of choice of the Proportional Representation Society of Australia (which calls it quota-preferential proportional representation), the Electoral Reform Society in the United Kingdom and FairVote in the United States (which refers to STV as proportional ranked choice voting and instant-runoff voting as "ranked choice voting", although there are other preferential voting methods that use ranked-choice ballots). Issues Degree of proportionality The degree of proportionality of STV election results depends directly on the district magnitude (i.e. the number of seats in each district). While Ireland originally had a median district magnitude of five (ranging from three to nine) in 1923, successive governments lowered this. Systematically lowering the number of representatives from a given district directly benefits larger parties at the expense of smaller ones. Supposing that the Droop quota is used: in a nine-seat district, the quota or