I’m swamped with work at the moment and haven’t had a chance to do any real (non-work) writing, but yesterday’s BC election–and particularly the rejectiond of a single-transferable vote system of quasi-proportional representation–has me thinking. I must confess to not having followed the BC (or earlier BC and Ontario) PR debates closely with respect to the particular systems proposed. But insofar as Paul Wells is right that one major obstacle to reform was the complicated nature of the proposed system, I have a proposal for an incremental reform that (I believe) satisfies the major concern of the pro-PR crowd while maintaining the most visible element of the status-quo.
The proposal is simply to adopt a single transferable ballot within each riding. Representatives (whether MPs or MPPs or what have you) will still be apportioned according to population within contiguous geographic bounds–i.e. ridings–but each voter within that riding will be able to indicate a second and even third ‘choice’ on their ballot. If no candidate receives a majority of votes within the riding based on first preferences, candidates receiving votes below a certain threshold will be disqualified and ‘their’ ballots recast according to those voters’ second preference. If there is still no majority winner, the process repeats until there is.
Having a single transferable vote system within ridings would–unless my math is wrong–eliminate the main objection to the First Past the Post System, namely its propensity in multi-party democracies to grant majority power to a party winning only a plurality of votes. If a government is formed by the party winning a majority of seats, and if each seat is held by a candidate who has ultimately received a majority of votes (whether first-preference or first-through-third preference), then a majority government will enjoy the electoral support of a majority of voters (assuming ridings are equal or roughly equal in population–and I’d be all for ensuring that this is, and continues to be, the case).
It’s not PR, by any means; but I happen to be one of the neanderthals who things that in a broad and diverse nation, expressions of geographic interest play an important role. In any case, it strikes me as being an incremental improvement that gets us closer to a truly proportional system of representation without scrapping the existing system entirely.
Thoughts?
Comments 1
Mader,
I agree. I’m a big opponent of any PR initiative, but I don’t really see an STV within each riding as PR. It is more like a run-off election held in one ballot rather than multiple ballots, which I would definitely be in favour of.
I would particularly like to see it, because my bet is that we would end up with roughly the same results that we currently get, except, as you say, the legitimacy of the result would be strengthened because the argument that a majority did not vote for the winning candidate would be eliminated.
My bet is that a slightly larger minority might vote for third-parties or fringe parties, but even these people will make the Liberals or Conservatives their second or third choice. It would prove, I would bet, that even once given the option to make their votes “count” people would still not vote in significant enough numbers for parties like the Greens or the Libertarians to elect more than a very small handful of candidates.
Posted 19 May 2009 at 21:52 ¶Post a Comment