Term Limits for the Detroit City Council.

[EastsideAl]

Electing city councils by at-large voting was originally one of the great liberal/ progressive pushes on the basis that it would eliminate ward politics and elect people who sought the good of the entire city.

Exactly, and people seem to forget this. There's a damn good reason why Detroit moved away from ward-centered politics all those years ago. District politics are far from a panacea and come with their own very long list of dysfunctions. Just look at Congress and Lansing, to say nothing of various sclerotic and corrupted regional boards for things.

The big problem is poorly informed voters, not the design of the institutions.

[Novine]

"That's easy. Granholm won't serve another term."

That assumes that Granholm would have run and would have gotten re-elected if there were not term limits.

What you're ignoring is that term-limits isn't keeping most of the politicians in Lansing out of office. They move onto a new office. Look at Oakland County where Mike Bouchard, Ruth Johnson and Andy Meisner all served in Lansing. You've got Bill Bullard on the County Commission along with at least 4 or 5 other former state reps.

[Bearinabox]

Electing city councils by at-large voting was originally one of the great liberal/ progressive pushes on the basis that it would eliminate ward politics and elect people who sought the good of the entire city.

More accurately, it was a push by the same group of upper-class white Protestant reformers that brought us Prohibition. Basically, their sensibilities were offended by the masses of hard-drinking blue-collar Catholic immigrants that flooded into large American cities during the late 19th and early 20th centuries from places like Italy and Ireland and Poland, and they didn't like that the ward system gave each ethnic neighborhood its own councilman. "People who sought the good of the entire city" was thinly-veiled code for respectable people like themselves who didn't live clustered-together in tiny apartments or densely-packed duplexes, didn't speak with funny-sounding foreign accents, didn't worship at those weird papist churches, didn't work in dirty factories, and didn't drink the devil's liquor at disgusting dive bars on the way home.

Granted, ward politics in ethnic neighborhoods at the turn of the twentieth century were notoriously corrupt, and the reformers certainly used that as ammunition to help them make their case, but their solution to the problem was to effectively disenfranchise the people they thought were voting the wrong way.

Reasonable people can disagree about whether council by districts will help with our current problems, but I don't think the original reasons for abolishing it are at all applicable today.