Rock the vote

There's an election going on in British Columbia today.

But more importantly, there's a referendum - for the second time this decade, BC residents are voting on whether they should switch from the first-past-the-post (FPTP) electoral system used in the rest of the country to a system called 'single tranferrable vote', or STV.

Last time this proposal was put forward to BC's electorate, 58% of them supported it - just shy of the 60% needed to put it through. It's been argued that if this referendum fails today, Canada might never see any true proportional representation in its electoral method.

Andrew Coyne explains very eloquently and succinctly why STV is much, much better than FPTP - but for those of you who find pieces of that length on electoral reform a tad too tl;dr, I give you a quick summary.

Under FPTP, you mark an 'x' beside the name of the candidate you want to represent your riding. If the vote is split among enough candidates, you can easily end up with the entire riding represented by somebody who was backed by only 35% or so of those who voted.

Under STV, each riding is given multiple representatives in Parliament - let's say five. Some parties - mainly the larger ones - would run five candidates, smaller parties might only run one or two.

Your ballot might have 20 names on it. Out of those twenty, you pick your top five, in order - you write a '1' beside your favourite candidate, your '2' beside your second-favourite, and so on, down to five.

After the polls close, the first-place votes are counted. If anybody passes the threshold of electability on first-place votes (i.e. if they get 20% plus one in this scenario), they are elected, and surplus votes for that candidate are given to the second-placer on each ballot. Whichever candidate receives the fewest first-place votes is dropped from the ballot, their votes are redistributed among second choices, and another round of counting ensues. And so on, until there are only five candidates left.

Sound complicated? Well, maybe a little bit. But unless you plan on working for Elections Canada, you don't need to worry about any of that - you just need to know the names of your five preferred candidates. You mark them down, and they'll take care of the rest.

It should be noted that STV is not an ideological issue - it's not the sort of thing where liberals are for it and conservatives against. (However, Liberals *and* Conservatives are both against it, the difference being that capital letters mean we're talking about political parties who would likely lose some of their influence under STV.) People of all political stripes - as long as they're not actually involved in politics - are in favour of STV, and lazy people of all political stripes are against it.

The first argument against STV is that it would increase the number of politicians, if we're electing five for each riding. This isn't the case - ridings would be amalgamated, so five people would combine to represent the interests of Kitchener, Waterloo, Cambridge and the surrounding area - the same number as now, only now they're each looking after their own slice of that space.

But wouldn't that make politicians less accountable to their constituents, if they have to represent that many more? This argument assumes that politicans already are accountable to those who elect them, which in practice today they are not - yes, your MP can advocate for something on your behalf, but when it comes time to vote, he has to do whatever his party leader tells him.

Wouldn't STV lead to a lot more minority governments, which are inherently unstable? Yes to the first part, no to the second. If there's that many more parties in Parliament, which there likely would be under STV, then yes, it would lead to regular minority or - *gasp* - coalition governments. But remember, people didn't vote for the party as much here - they voted for the individual candidates. If an individual is looking to bring the government down and force the country into an election, voters will remember that at the ballot box, and vote for the members of that party who were more willing to work with the government.

Hopefully STV passes tonight. If it doesn't, I'm not sure what chance the rest of the country ever has at such a system.

--Ryan