This weekend Thomas Mulcair was elected the new leader of the federal NDP and therefore of the Official Opposition. We are pleased that Mulcair has said that moving to a mixed-member proportional system will be a fundamental plank of the New Democratic Party’s platform next election: “Canadians are well aware of the pitfalls of our electoral system. They agree with us that change is needed. When we get elected, we will get elected with a strong mandate to address those shortcomings. If needed, we will cooperate with other parties in the House of Commons and the Senate in order to make electoral reform a reality.” We urge electoral reform supporters to hold the NDP to account moving forward.
As Elections Canada digs deeper into the voter suppression tactics employed in the last federal election (largely against Liberal supporters), we are reminded that the main reason such tactics can be effective is because of the pathological sensitivity of our current Single Member Plurality voting system to small manipulations of votes. With SMP, numerous ridings are typically won by vanishingly small numbers of votes (e.g., Jay Aspin won by only 14 votes in Nipissing and Ted Opitz by just 26 votes in Etobicoke Centre). Adding these up, we find that barely 6000 votes out of nearly 15 million cast (about 0.04%) meant the difference between a minority and a majority government in last year’s federal election. Robocall tactics in a few selected ridings can therefore easily have a hugely disproportionate payoff that simply could not happen under a more proportional voting system – for example, 7000 effective robocalls under proportional voting would likely have no effect at all since 50,000 voters would have to change their minds to shift a single seat. This hypersensitivity of SMP voting would also make internet voting highly susceptible to fraud. Check out SFU professor Anke Kessler’s assessment of the statistical impact of robocalling.
BC Liberal MLA John Les (Chilliwack) this month introduced a private member’s bill calling for online elections to start this fall to choose future BC Senators. Les’s proposal calls for BC to be divided into six electoral districts and for the current Single Member Plurality voting system to be used. In an additional wrinkle, he also calls for use of online voting. Fair Voting BC does not regard Senate reform as a high priority issue (reform of voting for the House of Commons is far more important), but warns that hasty proposals could lead to significant problems down the road. For example, using SMP (First Past the Post) voting would only replicate the current inequalities in the House, but proportional representation in the Senate might not be helpful either as that may prevent future changes in how the House is elected. It may, in fact, be better to make Senate elections entirely non-partisan so as to preserve and enhance the Senate’s function as a chamber of ‘sober second thought’. FVBC also strongly cautions against the use of online voting for public elections at this point; as political scientist professor Dennis Pilon of York University warns, online voting is currently “a horror show.” (photo courtesy of thoth188 on Flickr).
In the wake of last week’s filing of financial disclosure statements by Vancouver’s civic parties, showing that donations were up 50% from 2008 (from just under $4M then to just under $6M last year), including a single corporate donation of nearly $1M, Minister Ida Chong has said she won’t implement the request from Vancouver City Council to limit personal donations or ban union, corporate and foreign donations. According to Vancouver Courier columnist, Allen Garr, “in an act that can only be described as wilful ignorance, Chong has suggested if the parties want spending limits and electoral reform they are free to voluntarily agree among themselves”. And her proposed enforcement mechanism is even more bizarre: Chong said, “If they believe strongly that there should not be acceptance of corporate donations or union donations – if they believe strongly in that – then they should not accept them. And they can say phooey on the party that does.” Fair Voting BC would like to see rules with sharper teeth than that and encourages our supporters to say phooey to Minister Chong’s proposals.
Academy Award Nominees Chosen by STV
As people watched the Academy Awards last Sunday, we wonder how many realized that the nominees were chosen by preferential voting – in particular, a variant of the Single Transferable Vote (STV). The Academy Award organization actually uses slightly different rules for their various awards, so we can’t describe just one system, but most nominees in most categories are chosen using the following method:
- Most award categories accept five finalists.
- Academy members who are eligible to nominate movies in a particular category receive a ballot on which they can indicate their top five preferences (using numbers from 1 to 5).
- Any movies that don’t receive at least one first-place choice from a voter are eliminated.
- All ballots with the same first choice are grouped together.
- Any nominee with more than 1/6th of the total number of votes will become a finalist.
- If there are fewer than five finalists, the remaining nominee with the fewest number of votes will be eliminated and the ballots transferred to the next choice on each ballot.
- Step 6 repeats until there are five finalists.
In effect, this is a multi-seat version of Instant Runoff Voting, in which the lowest ranked candidates are sequentially eliminated. It has the effect of choosing a broad set of widely supported nominees.
This year, the Academy introduced a slightly different procedure for selecting the Best Picture nominees. The new process is a little closer in spirit to the Single Transferable Voting method recommended by BC’s Citizens’ Assembly on Electoral Reform in that extra votes (votes beyond the 1/6th of the ballots needed to win a finalist position) are redistributed in part to the second choice on each ballot after an initial round of elimination and transfers from the least popular nominees. This extra step is intended to ensure that ‘passion rules’ – i.e., that movies need both to have a loyal following and some broad support.
Wouldn’t it be nice if that were the way we elected our legislatures?
Related Links:
Fair Vote USA’s explanation of the process
‘Inside Movies’ explains the new nomination process for Best Picture
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Based on the results of Fair Voting BC’s democratic reform survey, Vancouver voters can be reasonably confident that the next city council will petition Victoria a third time to change the city’s charter to allow Vancouverites to choose their own voting system. They can also expect more deliberative dialogue processes similar to the West End Mayor’s Advisory Committee and continued interest in online voting, coupled with some scepticism about whether online voting can be acceptably secure. Depending on who gets elected, there will also be more or less openness to considering new ways to vote that might more accurately reflect voters’ true preferences. Read more…
2011 Vancouver Democratic Reform Survey – Responses by Candidate
On October 30, 2011, Fair Voting BC sent a survey on civic democratic reform issues to all mayoral and council candidates in the city of Vancouver. This page presents their detailed responses. We also invite you to check out the press release we issued on November 11, 2011, as well as a list of responses summarized by question. Read more…
This page presents responses to our Democratic Reform Survey (Vancouver) question by question. For answers by candidate and party, click here. For our press release, click here. Special thanks to Korky Day for collating the following answers. Read more…
CityVote Survey Asks Civic Candidates to Take a Stand
As we did in 2008, Fair Voting BC is again asking candidates for civic office to take a stand on the need for democratic reforms at the municipal level. This year’s questions include the following:
- Do you commit yourself, if elected, to renewing in the first year of your term the city’s long-standing request for Victoria to grant local governments the power to choose our own voting system?
- If elected, will you endorse expanded use of deliberative dialogue approaches (similar to the Mayor’s Advisory Council in Vancouver) to generate future policy options?
- Which of the following best describes your view of the benefits of online (internet) voting?
- Online voting is proven to substantially improve democratic engagement
- Online voting has good potential to improve democratic engagement
- Online voting is unlikely to significantly change democratic engagement
- Which of the following best describes your attitude towards the security issues related to online voting?
- Online voting is now sufficiently robust and secure to be used in civic elections
- Online voting is relatively secure and may be valuable for consulting citizens, but is probably too insecure to be relied on for civic elections
-
Online voting is currently too vulnerable to undetectable fraud to be used in a civic election
-
Please comment on what democracy-related issues most concern you (e.g., voting, campaign financing, citizen engagement, etc.).
- If you are a current council member, please highlight any democracy-related initiatives you or your party has undertaken in the past term.
- If elected, what do you personally commit yourself to doing during the coming council term to promote democratic reform?
We will be collecting responses until the end of the first week in November, at which point we will be distributing candidates’ responses to our supporters and to the media via a press release. At the moment, we are specifically inviting candidates in Vancouver to respond to this survey, but we encourage our supporters to volunteer to solicit responses from candidates in their own towns and cities around BC. Please send an email to info@fairvotingbc.com if you would like to help us in this effort – we can easily set up a custom SurveyMonkey survey for you and give you a link to distribute to your local candidates which will allow you to collect their responses automatically.
Provincial Elections Show Need for New Voting Systems
Voters Consistently Ignored With Single Member Plurality
A slew of recent provincial election results under the current Single Member Plurality voting system shows just how common it is for voters’ expressed intentions to be largely ignored in the makeup of the resulting legislature, and therefore how large swaths of the population end up not being represented the way they wish and deserve to be.
SMP Delivers Overwhelming Majority of Seats Even When Half the Voters Don’t Vote for Leading Party
PEI went to the polls in early October. The Liberals went into this election with a large lead – polls at the end of August were giving them a lead over the Conservatives of 59% to 31% (with the Greens and NDP splitting the last 10%) and, had this support held up, they certainly would have deserved to win a majority government. But would they have been entitled to win every last seat in the PEI legislature? That’s what seat projections were showing. Over the campaign, the race had tightened quite a bit: in the final days of the campaign, the Liberals lead had dropped to 53% and the Conservatives had risen to 34%. How would this shift in fortunes been rewarded by our voting system? The day before the election, the well-respected political predictor, Eric Grenier, at threehundredeight.com used polling data to estimate that the Conservatives would win a single measly seat. When the vote was counted, the race was even closer than the polls were showing – the Liberals had dropped a further 2% to 51% and the Conservatives had gained a remarkable 7% to end at 40%. However, the Conservatives were not rewarded for their valiant campaigning, ending up with a mere 5 seats to the Liberals’ 22 – i.e., with 51% of the vote, the Liberals took 82% of the seats. Perhaps more importantly, the Conservatives were essentially shut out of the more urban parts of the province – only their Stratford-Kinlock seat is close to the capital.
Such results are drearily typical of Single Member Plurality voting. Newfoundland had a similar outcome – the Conservatives won 56% of the vote and took a large surplus of seats: 37 of 48 (77% of the total). The Liberals retained the title of Official Opposition by winning 6 seats on 19% of the vote, while the NDP came in third with 5 seats on only 25% of the vote – well behind the Liberals. Huh? Only in the wacky world of SMP voting is 25% less than 19%!
Close Contests Are Really No Contest
In PEI and Newfoundland, SMP delivered an overwhelming landslide to the leading party. In both Manitoba and Ontario, the two leading parties had virtually the same level of popular support, but in both cases one party ended up with many more seats than their near-rival – on the order of 1.5-2X as many. Such distortions greatly exaggerate the actual closeness of the race, and, as in PEI and Newfoundland, tend to produce highly regionalized results (see maps below).
In Manitoba, the NDP won 46% of the vote to the Conservative’s 43% – quite a close contest. However, due to the vagaries of SMP, the NDP won 36 of 57 seats – 63% of the total. The Conservatives had to settle for 20 of the remaining seats, while the Liberals, who took 8% of the vote, had to settle for a single seat. As with PEI, there was a strong regional (rural/urban) divide with the Conservatives winning virtually all rural seats in the south of the province and on the southwestern edge of Winnipeg, while the NDP won almost all the other seats in Winnipeg and the northern half of the province.
It is somewhat ironic that the Conservatives had, at some points, been predicted to win a higher share of the popular vote than the NDP, but even if this had happened, the seat results would have remained unchanged. Conservative leader Hugh McFadyen resigned following the election, saying that the outcome was “far short of we had hoped for.” Despite virtually matching the NDP in the popular vote, McFadyen said “The reality is this in politics … you have to deliver bottom-line results if you want to carry on as leader of the party.” The irony is that this is not the reality in most countries around the world – maybe it’s time for the Manitoba Conservative Party to endorse a more proportional voting system so that their supporters can get the representation they deserve.
The Ontario election in October produced a similar result – the day before the election, ThreeHundredEight.com was predicting that the popular vote was a solid three-way contest with the Liberals slightly ahead of the Conservatives (36.6% to 33.3%), but this small difference was expected to deliver twice as many seats to the Liberals than to the Conservatives. The NDP, with 2/3rds the popular support of the leading Liberals, were expected to win barely one third as many seats. In the end, the Liberals ended up at over 37%, the Conservatives about 2% lower at just over 35%, and the NDP down to under 23%; the Liberals won one seat shy of a majority at 53 seats and the Conservatives gained ground to win 37 seats (the NDP took 17). This seat distribution corresponds somewhat more closely to the 
parties’ vote shares than originally predicted, but the Liberals still gained a significantly disproportional advantage from how the votes were distributed. As in Manitoba, the results reflected a strong regional divide, with the Conservatives sweeping several rural regions and the Liberals taking a disproportionate number of the seats in the Greater Toronto Area.
Time For Elections To Make Sense?
When I explained these various provincial election results to my children, they were aghast. “How can they let this happen?” they asked me. An excellent question. I’m doing all I can to stop these outrageous outcomes, and I invite all of you to join Fair Voting BC in working for an end to elections that don’t make sense.
