New Democrats for BC-STV part 3
Continued from here.
As a fitting new start, Andrew Coyne:
I know you're kind of busy right now, and maybe it's not my place, being from another province and all, but could I just ask you, on behalf of the rest of the country, to please vote Yes in the May 12 electoral reform referendum? I wouldn't intrude, except it's terribly important-important not just for B.C., but for all of us. . .
If there's anywhere electoral reform is most desperately needed, it's probably in federal politics: the damage FPTP has done, particularly in terms of regional ghettoization, is most acute there. But reform is most likely to occur at the provincial level first. And that means you. You came so close in 2005, when you voted 58 per cent in favour of reform-just shy of the required 60 per cent margin. If it's ever going to happen, B.C. is the place. And now is the time.
So come on B.C. Pluck up your courage. Show us the way. Light a candle for electoral reformers everywhere. We're depending on you.
So if STV receives more popular support than the government does for a second election in a row, could they not decide to put it to a vote in BC's legislature? Or is 60 percent the rule and case closed on BC-STV if they dont get it? What if STV receives 58.9% support this time? Because in that case they should think about tossing Campbell's Liberals and push through with STV, imo.
First Andrew Coyne, now Christy Clark.
They're tired of electing politicians who ignore what their constituents want and do what their leaders want them to instead.
And I hear that people have had it up to here with politicians who attack each other relentlessly in an endless vitriolic war of words that poisons us all against our democratic process.
I have learned through my own experience in radio and in politics that while those are all things that likely bother you, they don't for one moment bother the hacks, the backroom boys, and the politicians who are served and elected by our current system.
And when I look at so many of the people who are actively campaigning against STV, some of whom you often hear on CKNW, that is what I see: strategists and interest groups who have grown accustomed to the power the current system grants to them. I see people whose interests and in many cases, whose income is dependent on keeping our system the way it is. People who, unlike you, relish the ugly realities that are the consequence of our first past the post system.
They are fighting STV because the change it will bring frightens them.
First, it will force all politicians to compete for all of your votes. Candidates will be looking to be your first choice, but if not, then your second, or your third. In this context, no MLA will be safe forever, and every vote will be counted. We will stop throwing vast numbers of votes in the garbage once one candidate gets their 35%
Second, politicians will be forced to listen to their communities first and their leaders and parties second. When you vote you will have several choices to pick from your favourite party. If, for example, you are a committed BC Liberal wouldn't it be nice to be able to choose from among them the one who was brave enough to stand up for you and against his or her party and stop the road, prison, or big polluter from going through your back yard?
Wouldn't it be nice to choose the one who actually listened to you between elections?
Third, because STV will give you choices from among individuals, and you will have the choice to select the one you think is the smartest, most ethical, someone you can respect. How many times has a political party in your riding foisted a candidate on you who is an embarrassment but whom you vote for anyway because they are with the party you like?
Say good-bye to voting for bumblers who are destined for the backbench, because with STV you get to choose the best person not the party back roomers.
Fourth, the level of hateful invective will diminish radically. Under STV all politicians will have a strong incentive to get along better. They will be hoping to be the second or third choices of their opponents and supporters. The toxic insults and nasty rhetoric will be turned to a lower volume as politicians stop trying to win by ruining their opponents and instead start acknowledging them.
To me this is the biggest most important change that STV will bring about: civility in politics. I believe we need a new civility in our society and politics is where it can begin. . .
We have a choice, perhaps a once in a lifetime choice, to do things differently. We have a chance to change our political system and remake it into one that we can have some measure of faith in. If the established interests succeed in defeating this on Tuesday, they won't give you another chance. I hope British Columbians take this chance for real change.
I hope we take this chance and vote for STV on Tuesday May 12.
That equals the two NDP candidates who have now endorsed BC-STV, as well as the stack of NDP MPs.
And then, of course, there's the Post
http://www.nationalpost.com/opinion/story.html?id=1570620
One sign that a society is running out of real problems is that bored upper-middle-class types start inventing phony ones.
And then, of course, there's the Post
http://www.nationalpost.com/opinion/story.html?id=1570620
Kind of make ignorance a fashion statement!
Basically it is trying to make people feel stupid if they intend to vote for it.
They imply that fptp gives a stronger local link to the mla than stv. Having lived in both, I think the opposite. I always had 5 local "mla's and if I thought one was an ahole, I could still deal with the other 4. But in fptp, if the largest minority in your riding votes for a butthole, then you are represented by a butthole whether you like it or not and you have to talk to the ass if you have any political complaints.
Andrew Petter, former NDP attorney-general of British Columbia, and Troy Lanigan, president of the Canadian Taxpayers Federation:
As two people who hold different views on a multitude of issues, we share a common belief that a single transferable vote system (BC-STV) can breathe fresh life into our moribund democracy.
By producing legislatures that are unrepresentative, the current system breeds cynicism and discourages citizens from becoming politically engaged.
It creates so many "safe" seats that many people wonder why they should bother voting at all. And in the few ridings where an election is traditionally won or lost, it encourages people to hold their noses and vote "strategically" instead of for the person or party they believe in.
No wonder most democracies reject the first-past-the-post system.
With BC-STV, virtually every vote can contribute to electing an MLA. Every voter can play a meaningful part in the political process.
If your first choice is not elected, your vote is transferred to help elect your next choice. And if your first choice receives more votes than needed to be elected, the surplus value of your vote is also transferred to your next choice. As a consequence, results on election day more closely mirror voter intent.
When voters become more powerful, politicians are required to become more responsive and accountable, and are encouraged to work with people of differing political perspectives rather than against them. A more representative and diverse legislature would likewise promote cooperation over confrontation.
While neither is perfect, there can be no doubt as to which is superior. BC-STV provides dramatically fairer results, significantly better representation, and will immediately make politicians more accountable to voters.
On Tuesday, you will receive two ballots.
When marking the first ballot for the candidate and party you prefer, reflect on the millions of votes that will be wasted in this election with ballots just like that one.
Then pick up your second ballot and make sure it never happens again.
Power up your vote! Mark your referendum ballot for BC-STV.
Your Guide Through the Spin and Fear
There is a reason it is getting harder and harder to find 'experts' willing to endorse our existing FPTP voting system -- the present system is largely indefensible by any democratic criteria we might fashion. But No STV's arguments make sense when we understand them as part of a political battle to keep the status quo power arrangements in place.
I must have missed it, but Alex Atamanenko has added his name to the federal MPs endorsing BC-STV. That makes all of them except Nathan Cullen.
That's why I'm here, to demonstrate that MMP fans can be very happy with BC-STV.
Although what I really would prefer is Northern Irish STV, six MLAs for each federal riding. That's representation. Too bad BC doesn't want 216 MLAs.
Whoah. Stop the presses.
If "Irish STV" is your true preference, then why propose your design of MMP to the Assemblies?
You're just funning with us aren't you.
In any event Ireland is different than BC (or Canada for that matter) and the BC CA designed their system with an inherent knowledge of their province and political culture. Multi-layered heterogeneity.
That said, the number of MPs and DMs can change without abandoning STV. We adjust ridings etc. all the time. It's adaptable in that regard.
Meanwhile, as I predicted long ago, STV is going to be crushed in the referendum and will almost certainly get less than 50% support. The window of opportunity was 2005 - now that has passed.
"crushed" is such an tantalizingly poor word in politics where a 40% popular vote can yield a majority government and where, for years, the media has been saying that BC-STV was decisively rejected after garnering "only" 57%.
the fat lady hasn't sung yet...
I don't remember the media ever saying that STV was "decisively rejected" in BC. They described it (when they talk about it at all) as having narrowly failed to make the 60% threshold. But if it loses 60-40 after having taken 58% in 2005 - they can justifiably say that STV in BC is D-E-D dead!
sorry, mostly that was in the Ontario papers as an arguments against PR of any kind.
still, that was the characterization.
again, we'll wait for the opening chords of opera shall we.
By Mitchell Anderson
As a long-time advocate of electoral reform it is with a heavy heart that I must advise my fellow British Columbians to vote against BC-STV on the May 12th.
BC-STV or "single transferable vote" is a bad fit for Canada, and if adopted here could potentially become a mistake repeated in other provinces with potentially disastrous consequences.
The reason is that STV has an extremely poor record of representing the diversity that Canada is so renowned for, and may in fact lead to even less women being elected than our disgraced "first past the post" system that routinely returns only one in five elected female representatives.
If you watch this video of the Ontario Citizens Assembly process, you will see something that the BC citizens assembly never did. Professor David Farrell of the University of Dublin and authour of the textbook for both the BC and Ontario citizens assembly processes was asked specifically about STV and women during the deliberations in Ontario.
Professor Farrell states clearly that: "there is still this forlorn hope among STV proponents that you are going to find [more women elected under STV] someday but unfortunately Ireland and Malta as the only two countries that use single transferable vote are historically right at the bottom of the heap in terms of the representation of women, so it is just not working."
So why would the BC citizens assembly recommend a system that is even worse in terms of resenting gender equity (and ethnic diversity) than our current system? Perhaps because they were never directly presented with this important information. Incredibly, gender equity was never part of the mandate of the citizen's assembly.
This country exemplifies and celebrates diversity more than any other nation on Earth. There may be places that STV would be a better fit, but that place is not Canada.
Malta under STV elects less than 10% women, far worse than even our notoriously gender biased first past the post system. If we are going to bring in the first major electoral reform in North America, why would we want to start with a system that in many ways important to the Canadian character could be even worse than what we want to replace?
Many of these failings of STV flow from the notoriously adversarial system it uses to elect local representatives. In a single riding, literally dozens of candidates must compete for your attention, often of course by slagging their opponents.
People from the even the same political party are in direct competition against each other on a ballot that can be the size of a table cloth. Personalities like Don Cherry prevail. Those like Lester Pearson do not. It is little wonder such a gong show model attracts or elects such a paltry number of female candidates.
Likewise according to Professor Farrell, STV has a poor record of representing minority groups - another core Canadian value - in comparison to list systems like "mixed member proportional representation" (MMP).
So how did we end up in this mess? It is worth reflecting on flawed decision process imposed on the BC Citizen's Assembly in the final days of their determination. After months of mind-numbing expert presentations to lay members, the crucial decisions were crammed into only two weekend sessions.
The enormous investment of time and effort meant there was little doubt the assembly was going to recommend change. There was also a strong feeling among assembly members that they wanted to present a unanimous recommendation for an alternative model - either STV or the much more established model of MMP that has a comparatively stellar record of representing women and diversity.
In these final days, exhausted members were apparently faced with a small number of representatives (strangely from northern BC that will be very poorly served by STV) who made it clear they would block consensus if the recommendation was the MMP.
The rest is unfortunately history. In spite of the fact that fully 80% of public submissions instead supported some form of MMP, four years and two referenda later we are still stuck with a single choice: STV or nothing.
The good news is that there substantial and growing appetite for electoral reform in BC. The STV referendum in 2005 received 57% support. This was in spite of the fact that 64% of British Columbians knew "nothing" or "very little" about STV according to a Ipsos-Reid poll at the time. A second poll by Nordic Research Group poll on the eve of that referendum showed that only 37% of respondents could even name STV.
This was not for lack of trying. The BC government had mailed a 20-page explanation of STV to all 1.5 million households in the province, followed by a second mailing from the BC Referendum office.
British Columbians were voting for change. They were not voting for STV.
However, the many good people now working hard to promote STV maintain that this may be our last chance for electoral reform in BC. This is simply not true.
Five years ago it was a difficult to find more than a handful of people actively engaged on reforming our electoral system. We have since come a very long way in raising public awareness. Electoral reform is now inevitable in Canada, whether our politicians want it or not.
There is also an bizarre sentiment that STV is somehow a road to MMP. This is nonsense. If you find yourself standing at the front of a church about to be married to someone other than your true love, the time to call of the wedding is now - not after you have bought a house and had three children.
Once we change our electoral system, we will be committed to several election cycles before it can again be changed again. Untangling the mistakes flowing from the final days of citizen's assembly process 20 years from now will be exponentially more difficult.
We soon will have had two referenda on STV. If this second one again fails, proponents of STV must admit this model is truly a loser and throw their admirable determination behind the alternative MMP model, also developed by the citizen's assembly.
Incredibly, in spite of two referenda and hundreds of public submissions in support of it, this model has never been presented as a choice to the people of British Columbia.
Change must come to our electoral system. But not change that may make gender and minority representation in Canadian politics even worse.
Google can't find this piece. Do you have a link?
It's good to see Doris Anderson's son faithful to his mother's legacy. She was such a heroine in so many, many ways.
Unfortunately she just refused to listen to the fact that the failings of STV in the Irish Parliament related to Ireland's political climate. For example, the same STV system works very differently in Belfast City Council, where candidates from the same party seldom run against each other, parties run only the number they hope to elect, lots of women are elected, and only one independent holds a seat. Same in the Australian Capital Territory.
In Tasmania the Greens ran equal numbers of men and women, and elected them, forcing Labour to finally start a long-overdue affirmative action system to nominate and elect more women, which they did. Precisely the same thing as happened in Germany under MMP, where the SPD stalled until the Greens entered the Bundestag with equal numbers of women.
But in Ireland the Green Party elected only men right up until 2007.
Ireland is different. BC is different. But it's not like Ireland.
I don't know who Mitchell Anderson is when he's at home.
I'll leave addressing his insinuations about the Assembly to the alumni to deal with.
But I have "Electoral Systems" in front of me. In terms of "faithful" representation, Farrell is at great pains to point out that party candidate selection processes and culture are the critical limiting factors, not the electoral system. And where the essential culture was supportive of parity, that could be achieved. During the OCA it was mentioned a number of times that the results of any electoral system were constrained by the attitudes of the populace -- that adopting a new electoral system was not going to change those attitudes even if it better reflected them. That's what Farrell was saying.
Now here's the thing. This is true for many electoral systems. Guess where the problem really lies, then. OK, I won't make you guess -- it's with the parties.
Proponents of MMP say that it is the only electoral system that will improve representation for women. However, the efficacy of this approach depends on the particulars of the design as well as the willing participation of the parties.
Typically, at this point the MMP advocate will say something like, "A party wouldn't dare not zippering their lists". That strikes me as a bit naive. Historically, parties have decided that women generally cannot win seats reliably -- certainly not in SMP elections. In a typical MMP electoral system, one made up of a majority of SMP ridings, why would that systemic attitude change?
On the other hand in a multi-member STV district where a party might expect to win at least two seats, if that party was committed to parity and equality it could easily and would field equal numbers of men and women. Why? Because if gender parity actually is important, then electing equal numbers of men and women would maximize the results for the party.
Guess what? It is. In recent polls, something in the order of 98% of Canadians want more women in Parliaments. Amongst the electorate, the political will has existed for a while. If the parties are as keen for parity as the MMPers hope they are (else MMP will fail them), we could see gender parity in one election... but only with STV. But actually, all we need from them is to want to win. They all want that.
I do want to make one observation on Farrell that touches on this question of representation. Early in his book he argues that in terms of representation you can have either a microcosm -- a representative sample -- or choose a body of people who can make decisions and get things done. It was one or the other. The implication is that you cannot have both -- that once you commit to a degree of representation for women and minorities that is reflective of society, you had to give up on picking the best people for the job. The converse is that if you picked the best people you couldn't have reflective representation. Indeed, this seems to be the basis for our present levels of discrimination. And I think it's patently untrue.
It's clear that we can have both and should demand both. STV with its more candidate-centric preferential voting methodology gives voters the best opportunity to choose candidates that "look like them" but also to choose the best candidates too.
Perhaps, Farrell was thinking of MMP when he wrote that. You can't zipper effectively for gender, minorities and the best people for the job even with a closed list. With an open list you still have all those discriminatory SMP riding elections.
So if STV receives more popular support than the government does for a second election in a row, could they not decide to put it to a vote in BC's legislature? Or is 60 percent the rule and case closed on BC-STV if they dont get it? What if STV receives 58.9% support this time? Because in that case they should think about tossing Campbell's Liberals and push through with STV, imo.
The legislature is allowed to change the system any time it wants to. Even the referendum legislation says that the result is binding only if one side or the other exceeds 60% overall + majority support in 60% of the ridings.
By Mitchell Anderson
The consensus among academics would seem to be that women who are nominated under STV are every bit as likely to be elected as their male counterparts. The same is not true under FPTP, where women tend to be nominated in ridings where their parties have less chance of winning.
Ranger, I can find examples of single-digit women's representation for both MMP and FPTP, and lots of others have pointed out examples of STV electing 30%+ and even 40%+ women.
This anti-STV argument, like so many others, is just a crock.
Sure, with "affirmative action" (that you conveniently don't mention) just like every argument that you lose there is a council or school board to make you feel better and fool a few people, we give the examples and it's not our fault it's rarely used, it's an electoral system that not only puts candidates from other parties against one another but also puts candidates from the same party against one another, ironically the only system that has this dynamic, sorry, gals don't like this very much, ask them yourself if they like that idea instead of telling them.
Women are worse off under STV - Dennis Pilon is wrong
By Anne Edwards, No STV
I respond to Dennis Pilon 's Rabble article [STV: Your guide through the spin and the fear, May 7, 2009] specifically on his continuing claim that women stand a better chance of being elected under a Single Transferable Vote (STV) electoral system than under our current system of First Past the Post (FPTP). Perhaps his self-vaunted scholarship falls down on this point, too.
Vancouver City Councillor Andrea Reimer and I issued a release refuting STV proponents' claim that the system itself causes more women to be elected. We referred to Ireland and Malta, the only nations in the world to use STV in their national assemblies, not so we could omit other countries using STV who do better at gender equity.
Even at the sub-national level, the Australian senate, which moved from 14% women to 36%, does not show STV as the stimulus. Reimer pointed out that: "Those gains weren't made until one of their major parties made a commitment to run 50% women. It had nothing to do with STV and it's disingenuous to suggest it does." So where does Pilon look to buttress STV supporters' claims?
Not to John C. Lane of the State University of New York at Buffalo whose article, "The Election of Women under Proportional Representation: the Case of Malta" appeared in the summer 1995 issue of the British journal of Democratization.
A bit out of date, perhaps, as the Maltese women have done better in elections since then-hitting 9.2% of their assembly seats in 2003. Nevertheless, after a detailed study of voting data in Malta to discover reasons for "the paucity of women legislators," he concluded that Malta's "exceptional performance" (the lowest number of women elected of all western democracies) results from "the unwillingness or inability of party elites to recruit a substantial number of women candidates."
His conclusion is similar to those of many other scholars of women's political inequality: the main solution lies within political parties, not the electoral system.
Lane graphed "Women in West European and North American legislatures, by country and electoral system." Canada, with the highest representation of women among countries with single member district systems-including USA, Britain and France-about equaled Switzerland, with eight European countries doing better, eight doing not as well.
Malta was at the very bottom, Ireland four below Canada and Switzerland. Lane called STV a "variant of proportional representation," although other critics have referred to it as "occasionally proportional," "quasi-proportional" or "proportional by accident."
Currently BC has 23% women elected as Members of the Legislative Assembly under First Past The Post, Ireland has 13.3% women elected to their Parliament under STV and Malta 9.2% women under STV. BC has had 29% women-in the late 1990s after two by-elections returned women, but only Quebec in Canada has reached the 30% mark.
STV will not prevent women from being elected if the political parties decide to boost the number of women candidates. For example, STV did not prevent Mary Robinson from becoming the first woman president of Ireland in 1990 or Mary McAleese from succeeding her in 1997 to become the first woman in the world to succeed another woman as a nation's leader.
But it will not, as a system, promote the election of more women to our legislature.
Pilon claims to have come to his pro-STV position by "studying all the relevant debates and evidence germane to the topic."
I make no such extravagant claims about my knowledge of women in politics or about STV as an electoral system. I have done a lot of reading and talking and interviewing over a long period.
I am a member of BC's grassroots, and my association with politics was practical rather than totally theoretical. I simply offer my thoughts from a broad survey of information and a genuinely objective view of STV. For your consideration.
Anne Edwards is a former New Democratic Party MLA and cabinet minister, author of Seeking Balance: Conversations with BC Women in Politics and member of No STV, the official group opposing STV and supporting FPTP in the B.C. referendum May 12.
Now Paul Wells, editor of Macleans.
it is impossible to make any valid claims about why minority ethnic representation is so low without knowing what the ethnic makeup of both ireland and Malta are. Perhaps minority groups are underrepresented merely because their numbers are too low and most haven't become citizens yet. And both Malta and Ireland are overwhelmingly Roman Catholic which may say something about ethnic background if not about propensity for the parties to nominate female candidates.
By Anne Edwards, No STV
OK, I think we all understand that a No campaigner would take this position. I don't see anything new in this discussion.
Let's throw out some numbers for FPTP:
India: 9%
Ghana: 8%
Madagascar: 8%
Nigeria: 7%
St. Kitts: 7%
Marshall Islands: 3%
Yemen: 0.3%
Now MMP or List PR:
Colombia: 8%
Algeria: 8%
Albania: 7%
Sri Lanka: 6%
Equatorial Guinea: 6%
"Not fair" you might say. "Those places have a totally different culture from BC, and they don't tell us very much about how women would fare here."
And this is exactly the point.
This whole business of STV being worse for women is an absolute dead end argument to be piled on top of all the other irrelevant stuff that is getting thrown out by the No side.
Nobody ever wanted to move to ireland until about 15 years ago because it was poor. and it never had colonys, So it does not yet have big ethnic minoritys like france or england. And It has got more progressive socially since scandals in the major church blew priestly credibility out of the water. (I never met any bad ones myself but the way the organization hid and shuffled its evil men turned a lot of people away). What we can say that IS undeniable is that major us cities got rid of stv because blacks and communists were being elected through STV.
So if you want to stop blacks and communists from being elected, just vote no. (And pretend that you are not a racist).
it is impossible to make any valid claims about why minority ethnic representation is so low without knowing what the ethnic makeup of both ireland and Malta are. Perhaps minority groups are underrepresented merely because their numbers are too low and most haven't become citizens yet. And both Malta and Ireland are overwhelmingly Roman Catholic which may say something about ethnic background if not about propensity for the parties to nominate female candidates.
I love it:
. . . I learned early I would have to put up with the inevitable series of lectures, every time, from British Columbians about how life is so much better out there, and the landscapes are so much more beautiful and the lifestyles are so much more enjoyable and everyone's gorgeous and it never gets cold and on and on and freaking on about, How could you people from beyond the mountains be so dumb as to live in horrible places like Alberta and Ontario and the prairies and Quebec?
OK then. I get it. It's better in B.C. You live better lives in a better place, you're healthier and smarter and you barely pause to think about us poor shambling freaks on the other side of the mountains. Fine.
But then why do you cling to the very same electoral system we use? Especially when it delivers consistently appalling results that make your province's politics a national laughing stock?
Here's your chance to lead - or if the rest of us are too dumb to follow, then to go your own way. Which is what you never tire of telling us you like to do.
Voting for a sane electoral system is an excellent chance for British Columbians to put their money where their mouth is. What are you, chicken?
By Anne Edwards, No STV
OK, I think we all understand that a No campaigner would take this position. I don't see anything new in this discussion.
Let's throw out some numbers for FPTP:
India: 9%
Ghana: 8%
Madagascar: 8%
Nigeria: 7%
St. Kitts: 7%
Marshall Islands: 3%
Yemen: 0.3%
Now MMP or List PR:
Colombia: 8%
Algeria: 8%
Albania: 7%
Sri Lanka: 6%
Equatorial Guinea: 6%
"Not fair" you might say. "Those places have a totally different culture from BC, and they don't tell us very much about how women would fare here."
And this is exactly the point.
This whole business of STV being worse for women is an absolute dead end argument to be piled on top of all the other irrelevant stuff that is getting thrown out by the No side.
I think a more valid argument is that it won't necessarily be better for women. I suspect that it would be better for women in BC simply because there is more potential for women to win if they are nominated, and there would in all probability be more women nominated. Similar argument holds for ethnic and other minorities.
Nobody ever wanted to move to ireland until about 15 years ago because it was poor. and it never had colonys, So it does not yet have big ethnic minoritys like france or england. And It has got more progressive socially since scandals in the major church blew priestly credibility out of the water. (I never met any bad ones myself but the way the organization hid and shuffled its evil men turned a lot of people away). What we can say that IS undeniable is that major us cities got rid of stv because blacks and communists were being elected through STV.
So if you want to stop blacks and communists from being elected, just vote no. (And pretend that you are not a racist).
it is impossible to make any valid claims about why minority ethnic representation is so low without knowing what the ethnic makeup of both ireland and Malta are. Perhaps minority groups are underrepresented merely because their numbers are too low and most haven't become citizens yet. And both Malta and Ireland are overwhelmingly Roman Catholic which may say something about ethnic background if not about propensity for the parties to nominate female candidates.
STV never died out completely in the US (Cambridge, Mass. (which is hardly a major city)) and is experiencing somewhat of a revival for municipal elections.
Women are worse off under STV - Dennis Pilon is wrong
By Anne Edwards, No STV
I respond to Dennis Pilon 's Rabble article [STV: Your guide through the spin and the fear, May 7, 2009] specifically on his continuing claim that women stand a better chance of being elected under a Single Transferable Vote (STV) electoral system than under our current system of First Past the Post (FPTP). Perhaps his self-vaunted scholarship falls down on this point, too.
Vancouver City Councillor Andrea Reimer and I issued a release refuting STV proponents' claim that the system itself causes more women to be elected. We referred to Ireland and Malta, the only nations in the world to use STV in their national assemblies, not so we could omit other countries using STV who do better at gender equity.
Even at the sub-national level, the Australian senate, which moved from 14% women to 36%, does not show STV as the stimulus. Reimer pointed out that: "Those gains weren't made until one of their major parties made a commitment to run 50% women. It had nothing to do with STV and it's disingenuous to suggest it does." So where does Pilon look to buttress STV supporters' claims?
Not to John C. Lane of the State University of New York at Buffalo whose article, "The Election of Women under Proportional Representation: the Case of Malta" appeared in the summer 1995 issue of the British journal of Democratization.
A bit out of date, perhaps, as the Maltese women have done better in elections since then-hitting 9.2% of their assembly seats in 2003. Nevertheless, after a detailed study of voting data in Malta to discover reasons for "the paucity of women legislators," he concluded that Malta's "exceptional performance" (the lowest number of women elected of all western democracies) results from "the unwillingness or inability of party elites to recruit a substantial number of women candidates."
His conclusion is similar to those of many other scholars of women's political inequality: the main solution lies within political parties, not the electoral system.
Lane graphed "Women in West European and North American legislatures, by country and electoral system." Canada, with the highest representation of women among countries with single member district systems-including USA, Britain and France-about equaled Switzerland, with eight European countries doing better, eight doing not as well.
Malta was at the very bottom, Ireland four below Canada and Switzerland. Lane called STV a "variant of proportional representation," although other critics have referred to it as "occasionally proportional," "quasi-proportional" or "proportional by accident."
Currently BC has 23% women elected as Members of the Legislative Assembly under First Past The Post, Ireland has 13.3% women elected to their Parliament under STV and Malta 9.2% women under STV. BC has had 29% women-in the late 1990s after two by-elections returned women, but only Quebec in Canada has reached the 30% mark.
STV will not prevent women from being elected if the political parties decide to boost the number of women candidates. For example, STV did not prevent Mary Robinson from becoming the first woman president of Ireland in 1990 or Mary McAleese from succeeding her in 1997 to become the first woman in the world to succeed another woman as a nation's leader.
But it will not, as a system, promote the election of more women to our legislature.
Pilon claims to have come to his pro-STV position by "studying all the relevant debates and evidence germane to the topic."
I make no such extravagant claims about my knowledge of women in politics or about STV as an electoral system. I have done a lot of reading and talking and interviewing over a long period.
I am a member of BC's grassroots, and my association with politics was practical rather than totally theoretical. I simply offer my thoughts from a broad survey of information and a genuinely objective view of STV. For your consideration.
Anne Edwards is a former New Democratic Party MLA and cabinet minister, author of Seeking Balance: Conversations with BC Women in Politics and member of No STV, the official group opposing STV and supporting FPTP in the B.C. referendum May 12.
If what she says is true, then no other system of proportional representation will help the representation of women in BC either.
MMP won't. The three-tier list system of Sweden under which women comprise 47% of the Swedish Parliament, won't.
It would all depend on the political parties, and on who they chose to nominate.
But what she says is not true.
Some voting systems (like BC-STV) encourage parties to nominate a diversity of candidates, and some voting systems (like BC-STV) make it easy for voters to elect the candidates they want, even crossing party lines to do it if they wish (like BC-STV).
In Australia, PR-STV in the federal Senate made it easy for the Green Party to nominate women and to get voters to elect them. That's why 3 of the 5 Greens in the Australian Senate are women.
See http://greens.org.au/parliament
In Australia, PR-STV in state legislatures makes it easy for state Green Parties to nominate women and to get voters to elect them. That's why out of 19 Green state legislators in Australia, 9 are women.
See http://greens.org.au/statemps
See the example I gave in this thread. In Tipperary North in the last Irish election, on the final count some Labour voters gave Fianna Fail candidate Maire Hoctor enough second preferences to push her above her fellow FF incumbent into third place. They elected her, while FF Michael Smith lost his seat. This made sense: some women who voted for Labour's Kathleen O'Meara made the only other woman on the ballot their second choice.
I see that Ranger wasn't happy putting Anne Edwards' disinformation in one thread - he had to duplicate it. As I've established in this thread, she is responding to something that Dennis Pilon didn't actually say in his commentary. Also, her article doesn't support the title Women are Worse Off Under STV.
It may not be a scientific poll but one guy who visited New Zealand found they wished they had chosen STV over MMP.
You poor poor soul......... Now I'm just feeling sorry for you :( It's tough watching a dude flail away in quicksand.
Sure, with "affirmative action" (that you conveniently don't mention) just like every argument that you lose there is a council or school board to make you feel better and fool a few people, we give the examples and it's not our fault it's rarely used, it's an electoral system that not only puts candidates from other parties against one another but also puts candidates from the same party against one another, ironically the only system that has this dynamic, sorry, gals don't like this very much, ask them yourself if they like that idea instead of telling them.
Actually, the only way MMP is able to work for women is through affirmative action -- by zippering etc. It doesn't make those retained SMP riding nomination processes any more fair to women and minorities. Nor will they ever be.
And if the MMP design allows or enforces dual-candidacy, then that throws a large wrench into that engine anyway.
STV on the other hand doesn't provide a specific mechanism for affirmative action. What exactly were you thinking of?
From day one, an STV electoral system can elect women and minorities according to the will and intent of the electorate at large -- provided the parties dominate 'em.
My suspicion is that the anti-STV guys realize that -- and not wanting to (or perhaps not feeling able to) nominate women they know they'll be left holding the bag. Those would be pretty poor optics, even for politicos. Of course they don't want to be so obvious as the limiting factor. With the current system and MMP they can hide their true agenda.
Sorry, that sounded like a conspiracy theory. Didn't mean it to. I have to go balance a bottle on the door handle.
You poor poor soul......... Now I'm just feeling sorry for you :( It's tough watching a dude flail away in quicksand.
What a hoot. I don't know how you spent your 11 months in the Citizens Assembly but if you managed to gain any actual information or understanding, you've managed to keep it well hidden.
Over at the spin factory, if you find an isolated Irish editorial questioning STV, it's blown up to imply the whole country is looking to dump STV. Compared with most of the crap you've put up (and that's on those rare occasions when you've put up anything at all besides hyperbole), this is compelling evidence.
Review the commentary. Does it give you pause that all of the people that all of the people who really understand electoral systems seem to be on one side of the debate?
Did Carole James ever make any statement about supporting a lower acceptence threshold, sez I knowing the answer? I did pass on the idea as I said, up to the last minute when it never seemed to appear on online, but haven't been watching the news. In answer to Reefer Madness on another thread, I can give you my reasons why I don't like STV later, including mistrusting the Green party so much would be riding on then, but for the momnent I'm supporting it. No time to go over it now. Instead, does anyone know if theres still any active a public forms on this online, any one with a broad based audience, where I can add my own two bits. Way late last minute, but being one of handful of independents who actively campaigned against it last time it could still be of some small service. I'll check back later in a bit.
In addition to the 39% who voted for BC-STV, another 27% of the BC electorate are ready to scrap first-past-the-post for another proportional system.
“This poll illustrates how politicians and the media have misread electoral reform referendum results across the country in recent years,” said Larry Gordon, Executive Director of Fair Vote Canada. “Those who want to protect the status quo have been effective in attacking specific alternatives proposed in electoral reform referendums. But despite the referendum results, Canadians still understand at a gut level that the current electoral system is unfair and that a fairer and more proportional alternative is needed.”
Three things killed BC-STV:
Liberals became more positive about the existing system's seat majorities producing strong single-party governments. Liberals were about 10 per cent more positive about representatives making decisions rather than the people, 20 per cent more positive about parties winning a majority of seats without a majority of the votes, 10 per cent more positive about one-party rather than coalition governments.
All this shows that the context was tremendously important. We are further away from the problematic election results of 1996 and 2001. The Liberals had a much more moderate second term. And then there was the coalition government scare at the federal level.
Another key reason for the drop in support involves the role of the body that proposed BC-STV, the Citizens' Assembly on Electoral Reform. . . In 2009, the influence of the Citizens' Assembly all but evaporated.
A different question on the ballot may have reinforced this, especially for the one-third of voters who walked into the booth unaware of the referendum. . . In 2005, the ballot asked simply if B.C. should "change to the BC-STV electoral system as recommended by the Citizens' Assembly". Times were good, the Liberal premier initiated the process, and a bunch of ordinary citizens had "recommended" the change. There was no reference to the status quo. Liberal voters would not have seen it as an obvious threat to the party.
In 2009, the ballot asked voters which electoral system BC should use "the existing electoral system" or the "single transferable vote electoral system proposed by the Citizens' Assembly". It explicitly mentions the status quo and the new system is only a proposal. Some voters must have thought that the question applied to counting the votes in the current 2009 election. And Liberal voters could have more clearly understood this status quo-versus-change question as a threat to their government.
Yep, just so long as it's dead and not resting/pining for the fjords.
I just read in the tyee that the greens voters and ndp voters both gave stv over 60%. Unfortunately we live in fptp land where green and ndp votes (a majority if taken together) simply do not elect enough people to change to a fair system. And even if they did, the current ndp leadership in bc refuses to listen to their own voters and their own MP's. STV was beaten by a coalition of bc liberal voters and the carole james leadership of the bc ndp.
44.3% of voters voted no having absolutely no clue that they were rejecting a pro rep system. If the system had been mmp, perhaps 44.3% would have voted no and given exactly the same answer to the question. The average voter is not as smart as they think they are and they are really badly misinformed and do not have any idea that they are misinformed. But at least they think they are happy.
In addition to the 39% who voted for BC-STV, another 27% of the BC electorate are ready to scrap first-past-the-post for another proportional system.
Ignorance is bliss... even if takes a Brave New Soma to do it.
Just how happy do we want to be?
Oh come on now. The election and referendum were held 2 months ago, and the majority of people who bothered to vote (the one's who's voices and opinions should be counted and listened to) said NO to STV. Is there nothing more pressing to talk about in BC politics than a defeated referendum question? Fudget Budget 2.0 comes to mind. What about the Liberals telling the health authorities and other social service agencies NOT to report their numbers until after the election. So much for "the most open and accountable government in BC history." Actually the continuation of this thread is almost an example of why the BCNDP lost the election. These things are going on, and you guys are talking about something that the majority of people don't care about. It goes once again to strategy and tactics.
The comment about not trusting the Greens is telling and true. But let's be honest once again. The Green numbers in the last 3 elections have not trended upward on election day but rather headed downward. And their leader Jane Sterk, talking about legalizing ALL narcotics, including crack and crystal meth, showed where they are as a party. And in terms of the question posed by Strategic Communications, it doesn't say support STV. It talks about proportional representation. Can we please stop misrepresenting STV as proportional representation because its clearly not. For that fact, can we talk about something relevant and current in BC.
Another point, about the so called "ignorance of the voters in BC." At each polling station there was information that was available and handed out by workers of Elections BC concerning the question. It showed a map of how the current system works and how the electoral boundaries would look like with STV. Alot of people like me, no doubt took one look at the map, saw that under STV I would more likely than not LOSE my local representative (New West being thrown in with Burnaby, with Burnaby holding an approximately 4 to 1 population advantage, and 5 seats available, it would reason that the top 5 people would be from Burnaby. And therefore you could say that New West would lose its voice in the Legislature. Which it currently enjoys and continues to.) And simply voted No.
And Brian, its highly arrogant to attack the majority of people for doing whats normal human nature. If you don't understand something or you have an open mind and look at the issue of STV and see that the "proportional and representative" part of the equation don't add up, human nature would be to stick with what's already there. The "better the devil you know than the one you don't" reaction. Not too mention the relevance of the timing as well. People are more interested in their economic well being (sorry were after all this took place 2 months ago.) than about an issue that in this election clearly did not resonate with the voting public and for that fact alot of the members of the various political parties, other than the Greens, who if they were the military would have but one bullet in their gun, STV. When the numbers were 76 to 3 in the Legislature, people had a reason to look at the electoral system.
Then again, that mandate was a freak mandate, and in 2005 the numbers were more reflective of electoral trends. Percentages have rarely added up to seats in the Leg. Campbell started the argument when he fumbled bumbled and stumbled the 1996 election away by telling people the truth about what he was about. He had the most votes, but lost the election because of the riding boundaries. Then the crying and ballyhooing was in full play. In 2001, he got his 77 to 2 majority, and ran the province like a banana republic. One of the ways he secured that, was by having the media play out that if you're a progressive voter and don't like the NDP anymore, vote Green. Causing a perceived split at the centre left of the spectrum. And though the green numbers plummet election after election at the polls, Campbell laughs last, because fact is, is that the Greens are more like Campbell's Liberals rather than BCNDP. He gets his 3rd mandate, the 2 percent difference in the popular vote between the Libs and the NDP because some people still buy the notion that the Greens are a centre left party, and park their vote with them.
But its not about popular vote, its about ridings and local representation. And its that way for a long time more now.
Correct. "In a post-election survey of 1,000 B.C. residents, conducted by Vancouver polling firm Strategic Communications, 44.3% of those who voted for first-past-the-post in the referendum responded they are in “favour of replacing first-past-the-post with a voting system in which the percentage of seats a party gets in the legislature is more in line with their percentage of the popular vote”. For younger voters, those in the 18-34 age range, 52.8% who voted for first-past-the-post in the referendum said they support replacing it with a fairer and more proportional alternative."
Agreed. In my personal opinion, BC-STV proved too hard to understand for a population unfamiliar with it, and too easy to misrepresent; it is unsaleable in BC. The NDP position, that MMP was more appropriate for BC, was correct after all. MMP preserves local ridings and local representation, but would add a number of regional compensatory MLAs. To avoid increasing the number of MLAs, local ridings would have to be a bit bigger, but you would still have them.
You've actually proved the point about ignorance of BC-STV, and my point about BC-STV being too hard to understand. Not that it really matters anymore, but for the record, under STV it is not "the top 5 people" who get elected. You are thinking of the block vote used municipally.
That was one of the main problems BC-STV had, explaining that it was different from the municipal block vote. Under STV in a five-seater district like Burnaby-New West, you vote for one person, not five. It takes only 16.7% of the vote to get elected. New West could expect to still have an MLA. But there was no guarantee of this. Burnaby-New West would likely have elected three NDP MLAs and two Liberal MLAs. I'm pretty sure Dawn Black would have been popular enough across the district to have been one of the top three NDP candidates. But in a future election, it might be different.
Under STV in a five-seater district like Burnaby-New West, you vote for one person, not five.
Huh?? Talk about not understanding STV.
It is actually a simple system to understand at it's core. But one needs to present it propoerly and it wasn't not even in the Assemblies by the academics -- hence the ignorance.
With proponents like this who needed a "No" campaign to defeat it?
Under STV in a five-seater district like Burnaby-New West, you vote for one person, not five.
Huh?? Talk about not understanding STV.
Clearly keglerdave thought it was like the municipal block vote, where you have five votes.
STV = Single Transferable Vote. One vote, transferred to subsequent preferences if necessary. Isn't that the simplest way to explain STV in a province where municipal councils are elected by block vote?
Under STV in a five-seater district like Burnaby-New West, you vote for one person, not five.
Huh?? Talk about not understanding STV.
Clearly keglerdave thought it was like the municipal block vote, where you have five votes.
STV = Single Transferable Vote. One vote, transferred to subsequent preferences if necessary. Isn't that the simplest way to explain STV in a province where municipal councils are elected by block vote?
Good grief, Wilf.
The "single" really refers to the number of times you have to go to the polls because you don't vote for just "one person" as you said above (that was you, not klegandave, right?), but provide a ranked list of as many candidates as you wish.
STV has been so poorly presented (and named) that I understand why you're confused and why you focus on entirely the wrong aspects. I blame the academics. The transfers are a mere artifact of the aggregation counting method. The system would work as well -- or better -- with a different aggregation technique. It is the fundamental characteristics of STV that the BC-CA recognized as a solution to the electoral reform problem, not the counting method.
The real point to make to klegandave is that the problems we're having with our democracy are systemic and electoral reform is an initiative to address problems at the systemic level -- not to just put a band-aid on particularly obnoxious instances -- which is the usual modus operandi in politics (cf MMP). This is why we're still going on and on and on about electoral reform. It's as topical now as much or more than ever.
All this goes to show that while the NDP leadership pays lip-service to electoral reform (yes to pr - no to the model proposed), their base shows a deeper understanding of democracy - and that is a very good thing.
In Ontario, where the Citizens Assembly effectively called their bluff and proposed the party's preferred model - MMP - they still managed to undermine the campaign - particularly by declaring that it was "doomed to fail" before the campaign even began.
Insofar as it matters (which isn't very much) not all MMP designs are alike (and there is a wide variation possible) and OCA-MMP was a particualrly bad one.
Even if the electorate understood the proposal they would have rejected it -- or should have. as it was so few people understood the issue at hand.
It was doomed to fail in any event the NDP vassillations notwithstanding.
The OCA model was still better than FPTP. MMP may have had a better chance had the party bosses & media establishment not been given space to grab the "anti-party boss" line which MMP campaigners were reluctant to use for fear it would alienate centrist voters. Had the MMP campaign been more willing to label FPTP as undemocratic rather than that MMP was a democratic "improvement", the campaign could have picked up some steam and possibly cracked 50% if not better.
And there were quite a few NDP candidates who were on board.
Indeed. And the good news is, in addition to the 39% who voted for BC-STV, another 27% of the BC electorate are ready to scrap first-past-the-post for another proportional system.
Not so. In 2002 the Ontario NDP held its own hearings across Ontario with its own NDP PR Task Force and concluded that regional lists were necessary, and in particular, the North had to be a separate region (Northern votes would go to elect Northern MPPs). The Ontario CA model might have been saleable if we had had an extra year for the NDP and then the Liberals to say that, if it was passed, they would do as the major parties do in New Zealand -- hold about six regional nomination conventions, and then fold the six regional lists into one. And the PCs might have said they would do as the Scottish Conservative Party does -- just put their local candidates on the provincial list. But there was not even time for the NDP to have that discussion and come to that decision. In fact, it was not a good model. CA Chair George Thomson has stated that, if the CA had had another three weekends of deliberation, he thinks they would have reconsidered province-wide closed lists.
But the ranked list counts as one vote, not five. That's the fundamental point, which makes STV a proportional system.
The transfers are an excellent feature -- as the BC-STV Campaign said "Only if your first choice has been elected and doesn’t need your entire vote or if they have so few votes that they can’t win does your next choice count. Think of your vote like a dollar which you give to your first choice. If your first choice only needs $.90, you still have a dime to go to your second choice. Or, if your district hasn’t elected enough MLAs yet, the last placed candidate is eliminated. If you chose this candidate, your entire $1.00 goes to your next choice." But they don't affect the majority of votes cast.
Take the last Irish election, in a typical five-seater, Wicklow. Of the 64,925 votes cast, 64% counted for (and elected) their first choice, 19% transferred to one of the five who were elected (2 Fianna Fail, 2 Fine Gael, 1 Labour, being three incumbents and two newcomers), 12% counted for the loser on the final count (the third Fianna Fail man), and 4% were exhausted when voters did not rank enough candidates.
A lovely system. But BC voters mostly didn't get it. However, the majority of them are ready to vote for a better system.
Gary:
OCA-MMP was only better than FPTP from a very narrow, blindered point of view. In the larger context of addressing the democratic deficit on behalf of voters it was a non-starter. It would only have had a chance in a massive smoke-and-mirrors campaign that presented only partial information and context to voters. In any other event it was doomed to failure.
Wilf:
Transfers are (almost) totally beside the point. Looking at STV in those terms -- as you persist in doing -- obscures the real essence of the system and its value to the electorate... and to parties and government too.
There's an ad on TV for a phone with a keyboard that you should watch for and pay close attention to. I've mentioned it before on babble. The ad starts with a man repeatedly sliding his phone open to reveal a full keyboard and closed to hide it whilst intoning "...and it slides in and it slides out and it slides in and it slides out..." over and over. A woman approaches and when she sees the keyboard exclaims how wonderful it would be as a tool for expression. The man listens to her, misses the point and continues with his pointless slides-in-and-out monotony.
The point of STV is the facility for expression (representation) not the particular mechanism (which could just as easily be another method) of enabling a part of that expression.
For the most part, the presentation of STV has been on the level of that monotonous man, not the perceptive woman. BC voters didn't get it? Of course they didn't -- not with explanations like yours. And the campaign generally I should add -- it's not just your fault though a celebrated electoral reform guru like you (I'm just repeating what others say about you here) one might expect you to understand...
And just for the record, you stated in the post I criticized, that in STV "you vote for one person, not five". That's absolutely wrong, your hand-waving notwithstanding.
Hardly. I just showed you in Wicklow that was 64% correct. But you're right, I should have said in STV "you have one vote, not five."
All of which is thread drift. Did I mention that "the good news is, in addition to the 39% who voted for BC-STV, another 27% of the BC electorate are ready to scrap first-past-the-post for another proportional system."
Hardly. I just showed you in Wicklow that was 64% correct. But you're right, I should have said in STV "you have one vote, not five."
All of which is thread drift. Did I mention that "the good news is, in addition to the 39% who voted for BC-STV, another 27% of the BC electorate are ready to scrap first-past-the-post for another proportional system."
You just dig yourself into a deeper pit with your Wicklows. You haven't shown a thing by telling these stories except to illustrate by how much you've missed the point. Same old, same old, eh. .
News?? Sure you did... too bad that that is a meaningless and powerless statistic. It isn't news that Canadians might be behind change. However, no one has gotten any traction from this "good intention" where it matters. As my old dad would say, "Good intentions pave the road to hell". Fair Vote could have obtained a similar statistic on the day they began 10 years ago. Where has it gotten us?
Point one, STV is a pro rep system. It does not matter what you say or think. It IS a pro rep system. Saying it isn't is just propaganda.
Kegler said "But its not about popular vote, its about ridings and local representation. And its that way for a long time more now." What the hell is that?
You have basically ruled out all other pro rep systems with that statement.
You really reallly really do not have a clue, do you? I had 5 local representatives in stv, and I have one in fptp. It is extraordinary that you think that ndp voters or green voters can be represented by 1 bc lib mla in their riding.
So when you go 2 doors down to your local "mla", does he tell you to F off? Or does he have "no dogs and especially NO NDP" on his door?
Consult with a few books before making comments, perhaps? I guess you are guided by some "wise" guy who told you how to vote? (which is great for him).
Now, about Jane sterk and legalizing drugs. Maybe, just maybe, you are again guided by the rituous mob?
There are cops that spent their working lives fighting the good fight against drugs in the grand old usa who are touring around the world saying exactly the same thing as sterk! If drugs were legal, your son or daughter or brother or wife would not be sneaking off buying crap off some maggot down an alley, would they? If they spent some of the drug war millions on drug victim treatment, it would be a whole lot better. Basically, lots of people do addictive drugs but just a small percentage get addicted. I know people who gave up coke because it cost too much.
Both of them said "its a great drug but too expensive" . So even if there is a forever war on drugs, there will always be lots of users because they make some people feel good and feeling good is where it is at. I have never done an illegal drug in my life but hey live and let live. I know lots of people who are total bastards if they do not have their toke during or at the end of the day. Guys who would punch me out without drugs just laugh and let live when they are tokin.
With STV You would probably get one rep in new west and 4 in burnaby with stv. It depends on a lot of stuff. One thing for sure, new west and burnaby could not have all 5 mla's representing one party. I guess they did 3 elections ago. Did you feel represented then?
Please spare me the propaganda and mis information. It worked on you and that is all that matters. Explaining "Then again, that mandate was a freak mandate" is totaly disengenuous. The tyee said that over 60% of ndp voters voted for stv. why not get the party leadership back on track and mirror what the voters want? I do not mind if it is mmp that they offer. Diliver MMP if they get into government and I will gladly vote for them. But I bet the leadership just want to offer another stupid referendum.
By the way, over the 2 referendums, which got more votes, STV or FPTP?
Just curious.
Another point, about the so called "ignorance of the voters in BC." At each polling station there was information that was available and handed out by workers of Elections BC concerning the question. It showed a map of how the current system works and how the electoral boundaries would look like with STV. Alot of people like me, no doubt took one look at the map, saw that under STV I would more likely than not LOSE my local representative (New West being thrown in with Burnaby, with Burnaby holding an approximately 4 to 1 population advantage, and 5 seats available, it would reason that the top 5 people would be from Burnaby. And therefore you could say that New West would lose its voice in the Legislature. Which it currently enjoys and continues to.) And simply voted No.
And Brian, its highly arrogant to attack the majority of people for doing whats normal human nature. If you don't understand something or you have an open mind and look at the issue of STV and see that the "proportional and representative" part of the equation don't add up, human nature would be to stick with what's already there. The "better the devil you know than the one you don't" reaction. Not too mention the relevance of the timing as well. People are more interested in their economic well being (sorry were after all this took place 2 months ago.) than about an issue that in this election clearly did not resonate with the voting public and for that fact alot of the members of the various political parties, other than the Greens, who if they were the military would have but one bullet in their gun, STV. When the numbers were 76 to 3 in the Legislature, people had a reason to look at the electoral system.
Then again, that mandate was a freak mandate, and in 2005 the numbers were more reflective of electoral trends. Percentages have rarely added up to seats in the Leg. Campbell started the argument when he fumbled bumbled and stumbled the 1996 election away by telling people the truth about what he was about. He had the most votes, but lost the election because of the riding boundaries. Then the crying and ballyhooing was in full play. In 2001, he got his 77 to 2 majority, and ran the province like a banana republic. One of the ways he secured that, was by having the media play out that if you're a progressive voter and don't like the NDP anymore, vote Green. Causing a perceived split at the centre left of the spectrum. And though the green numbers plummet election after election at the polls, Campbell laughs last, because fact is, is that the Greens are more like Campbell's Liberals rather than BCNDP. He gets his 3rd mandate, the 2 percent difference in the popular vote between the Libs and the NDP because some people still buy the notion that the Greens are a centre left party, and park their vote with them.
But its not about popular vote, its about ridings and local representation. And its that way for a long time more now.
I think ALL new electoral systems will be defeated in referenda, Wilf.
Referenda are just part of the road block for pro rep, now.
The ndp need to propose a live mmp variant and make it part of their platform for government. Just by doing that they will get over half of the green votes in the next election. They should do it at national level and at provincial level. Words are great but action speaks a lot louder. Carole James voted against pro rep twice. Her riding gave it thumbs up twice. They need to lose the disconnected leader.
Brian:
I'm sure the NDP appreciates the advice of a Green Party apologist when it comes to what they should do with their leader. As for your contention that police support the Green Party's position on legalizing ALL narcotics, funny that a police officer I know with the VPD ripped into Matthew Laird (Green Party candidate in the last election) over Jayne Sterk's proposal. Incidentally this officer's beat is the DTES. He was incredulous that Ms. Sterk and her party would pitch such an outlandish proposal. Easy to do I suppose when you're not in the legislature and not going to be for a long long long time, given the continued downward trending of the Green Party's numbers. Fact is there's a lack of resources from housing and medical, to psychiatry and detox / recovery, as well as employment and hope for people addicted to drugs in BC. Tonnes of lip service is paid to the problem by all levels of government, but fact is not a lot is really done to help out and turn things around. Legalizing narcotics as a whole could quite possiby lead to a stupified population, walking around stoned. Wait, I just got it. I now know why the Greens are so in favour of this proposal and pushed it hard in the last election: Its the only hope they ever have of getting elected.
Now onto your statements about STV. "With STV you would PROBABLY get one rep in New West and 4 in Burnaby. It would depend on a lot of things." Congratulations Brian... you just made my case by using a simple word: PROBABLY. Smaller ridings such as New West and others currently enjoy actually HAVING an MLA, not probably or perhaps having one. And regardless of their political stripe, the successful MLAs get one simple thing, you have to represent ALL your constituents, not just the ones that voted for you. For that fact ALL successful politicians get that. Those that don't, like Joyce Murray for example, find themselves out of a job the next election. The job of the MLA is to represent ALL their constituents in the legislature, and in New West's case that isn't just labour, but also small and medium size businesses and industries. Joyce chose to ignore her constituents and behold herself to Gordo only. And she paid a hefty penalty for that. Whereas people like John Cummins, Svend Robinson, Peter Julian, Hedy Fry, and others have heeded those lessons, and are often returned with ever increasing majorities over their careers.
In terms of my understanding about STV, if you live in a riding with 5 seats up for grabs, you rank your ballot one through five for the five people you choose to support. Wilf, I do believe you when you say someone of Dawn's stature would probably have succeeded even in STV, but there's that word PROBABLE. I don't think someone like Chuck Puchmayr would have though. As he had limited exposure in the bigger arena of Burnaby. Either way, to me, its quite simple. Anything and I mean ANYTHING that takes away ASSURED representation of a riding that already has representation in the legislature is DEAD WRONG, and clearly the majority of the voting public agree with that assertion. The Greens are just pissed off that their one big issue, the one thing that they hold out hope for in terms of getting elected or someone in the legislature, was turned down by the voters of the province, those people who care enough to take the minute it took to go out and be heard. And standing on the sidewalk calling for Carole James resignation does nothing to further their case.
So its left to the Greens to roll up their sleeves, and work hard within the rules as they exist to try and get someone elected to some level of government. Much like other fringe parties have had to do. The electoral reform issue was decided. The people have spoken, and the vote cast. We've had almost 13 years of electoral reform talk and in the end, the electorate chose to stay the course. Their opinion should be respected.
Sorry Brian, one more thing. When it comes to misinformation and propaganda, and spin spin spin... I think that its you that should spare everyone else your crap. 3 elections ago, was an aberration. BTW, how did the Greens do in that election? How about 0 MLAs. Forward to 2005, four years for the Greens to supplant the NDP as the opposition against one of the most hated right wing governments in BC history. From 3 to 33 for the BCNDP, from 0 to... wait for it.... 0 for the Green Party, who's numbers incidentally went down from 2001. Yeah you were "thiis close" on the referendum on electoral reform in 2005, but fact is you didn't break the threshold set, which imho was too low anyways. Changing an electoral system is somewhat akin to changing the constitution. To do that you need 75% support. So 60 was too low. This time around, you got thumped. The reasons are not relevant, though cry over spilled milk you may, the fact remains, STV was soundly rejected by the electorate. So you retaliate and tell everyone that we who don't support STV are ignorant and misinformed? No. Its just that we don't drink your Kool Aid or believe your BS.
And Brian, 4 years later in 2009, with 5 more seats available throughout the province... what happened. Lets see, pretty much the new seats were a saw off between the BCNDP and the Libs. They also traded seats in 2 ridings as well. And what kind of electoral success did the Green Party have? 2001.... 0 seats. 2005.... 0 seats. 2009.... 0 seats, and another drop in popular support. So you can sit there and wallow in your pity all you want, and attack me for "propaganda and misinformation." But I still hold to this point, when you say that STV is proportional, that is misinformed and misleading. And with your party's numbers continuing their downward trend election after election, one wonders, just how relevant you really are to the electorate of BC?g
In terms of my understanding about STV, if you live in a riding with 5 seats up for grabs, you rank your ballot one through five for the five people you choose to support.
But why rank only 5 candidates? There are likely to be many more on the ballot.
And, just out of interest, how would you see yourself ordering those you chose to rank? Who's on first?
Either way, to me, its quite simple. Anything and I mean ANYTHING that takes away ASSURED representation of a riding that already has representation in the legislature is DEAD WRONG
Hmmm... "assured" representation sounds a lot like safe seats -- seats that never change party hands and never enable many (sometimes a majority) of constituents an effective voice in parliament.
Correct me if I'm wrong but does that mean any system that allows let alone facilitates any upsets to the status quo in terms of seat distribution is wrong?
No "usual suspect" electoral system -- including MMP and STV -- takes away representation. On the other hand, almost every form of (more or less) effective electoral reform -- inlcuding the above -- will almost certainly alter the riding composition to attempt to achieve better representation for the electorate.
Safe seats are an anathema to voter representational fairness.
I'm just trying to understand your point. Would you please elucidate.
But in stv, dave, these abborations cannot happen. Campbell getting 77 seats on 55% of the vote cannot happen in stv. Thats not a probability, its a fact. As I said, . STV is a pro rep system. Read it in a political science book or on wikipedia. Your choice, same result. It is totally pig headed to give your "opinion" on this. It is not even open to discussion. ANY political scientist will tell you.
Changing an electoral system if the majority approves is no big deal. In canada a majority in the ledge can change the elections system for next election if they want. However Saying that 42 votes outvote 58 votes is a very big deal. And you seem to be going even more into ultra faschist terrortory.
You want 25 votes to beat 75 votes. Well, good for you! But is that fair? Its all about fairness, isnt it? Should 25 votes beat 75 in a democracy?
You have the spoiled child version, I guess.
The tyee claimed that ndp voters gave STV the thumbs up this time round. What is your take on that?
Sorry Brian, one more thing. When it comes to misinformation and propaganda, and spin spin spin... I think that its you that should spare everyone else your crap. 3 elections ago, was an aberration. BTW, how did the Greens do in that election? How about 0 MLAs. Forward to 2005, four years for the Greens to supplant the NDP as the opposition against one of the most hated right wing governments in BC history. From 3 to 33 for the BCNDP, from 0 to... wait for it.... 0 for the Green Party, who's numbers incidentally went down from 2001. Yeah you were "thiis close" on the referendum on electoral reform in 2005, but fact is you didn't break the threshold set, which imho was too low anyways. Changing an electoral system is somewhat akin to changing the constitution. To do that you need 75% support. So 60 was too low. This time around, you got thumped. The reasons are not relevant, though cry over spilled milk you may, the fact remains, STV was soundly rejected by the electorate. So you retaliate and tell everyone that we who don't support STV are ignorant and misinformed? No. Its just that we don't drink your Kool Aid or believe your BS.
And Brian, 4 years later in 2009, with 5 more seats available throughout the province... what happened. Lets see, pretty much the new seats were a saw off between the BCNDP and the Libs. They also traded seats in 2 ridings as well. And what kind of electoral success did the Green Party have? 2001.... 0 seats. 2005.... 0 seats. 2009.... 0 seats, and another drop in popular support. So you can sit there and wallow in your pity all you want, and attack me for "propaganda and misinformation." But I still hold to this point, when you say that STV is proportional, that is misinformed and misleading. And with your party's numbers continuing their downward trend election after election, one wonders, just how relevant you really are to the electorate of BC?g
Oliva Chow gave the provincial ndp the advice that they should support STV. So did Denise Savoe, And others. Who are the NDP? They are ultimately just voters. And NDP voters gave STV over 50% in 2 referenda. So you, dave and Carole james are not in touch with your grass roots. I did not have a contention about the police supporting legalizing drugs. What would they do with their time if that happened? But there are retired US cops that tour around saying that the war on drugs is bullshit. Always was, always will be. columbia and usa have a war on drugs. Check out their murder rates. Is it higher than Hollands? Dave, we DO have a stupified population walking around stoned. I lived in holland for a year and I bet there are a lot more stoned people here than there was there. That guy with the constant sniff, its not a cold, it a coke head.
And the aimless chicken guy? He is an occasional pot user.
Funny, the constant pot users do not do the aimless chicken thingy. Maybe it is just the job I do but I meet a hell of a lot of people who take drugs. I am pretty sure it is not the job, it is the culture. No amount of policing is going to stop bc smoking pot and other stuff. So legalize the stuff, sell it in stores and put a tax on it. You might like to check out the history of prohibition (of alcohol) in the usa.
Dave, you PROBABLY got shitty math scores in school. You PROBABLY had a bc lib representing you in the campbell 77 of 79 election and you PROBABLY were not that happy with that representative. But even when you have a losing hand, you PROBABLY keep it because you are afraid of being an even bigger loser. Almost 80% of irish votes count in electing someone and nobody knows which votes will lose. In BC all greens know beforehand that they will lose and most ndp voters (depending on which riding they are in) know that they will lose too!. No wondor people do not bother to turn out on elections day. Dave, you probably don't have a clue. And thanks to people like you, we are all losers. Stuck with scratching an x on a piece of paper. A monkey could do it. But monkeys cannot comprehend 1,2,3 in order of your choice.
Brian:
I'm sure the NDP appreciates the advice of a Green Party apologist when it comes to what they should do with their leader. As for your contention that police support the Green Party's position on legalizing ALL narcotics, funny that a police officer I know with the VPD ripped into Matthew Laird (Green Party candidate in the last election) over Jayne Sterk's proposal. Incidentally this officer's beat is the DTES. He was incredulous that Ms. Sterk and her party would pitch such an outlandish proposal. Easy to do I suppose when you're not in the legislature and not going to be for a long long long time, given the continued downward trending of the Green Party's numbers. Fact is there's a lack of resources from housing and medical, to psychiatry and detox / recovery, as well as employment and hope for people addicted to drugs in BC. Tonnes of lip service is paid to the problem by all levels of government, but fact is not a lot is really done to help out and turn things around. Legalizing narcotics as a whole could quite possiby lead to a stupified population, walking around stoned. Wait, I just got it. I now know why the Greens are so in favour of this proposal and pushed it hard in the last election: Its the only hope they ever have of getting elected.
Now onto your statements about STV. "With STV you would PROBABLY get one rep in New West and 4 in Burnaby. It would depend on a lot of things." Congratulations Brian... you just made my case by using a simple word: PROBABLY. Smaller ridings such as New West and others currently enjoy actually HAVING an MLA, not probably or perhaps having one. And regardless of their political stripe, the successful MLAs get one simple thing, you have to represent ALL your constituents, not just the ones that voted for you. For that fact ALL successful politicians get that. Those that don't, like Joyce Murray for example, find themselves out of a job the next election. The job of the MLA is to represent ALL their constituents in the legislature, and in New West's case that isn't just labour, but also small and medium size businesses and industries. Joyce chose to ignore her constituents and behold herself to Gordo only. And she paid a hefty penalty for that. Whereas people like John Cummins, Svend Robinson, Peter Julian, Hedy Fry, and others have heeded those lessons, and are often returned with ever increasing majorities over their careers.
In terms of my understanding about STV, if you live in a riding with 5 seats up for grabs, you rank your ballot one through five for the five people you choose to support. Wilf, I do believe you when you say someone of Dawn's stature would probably have succeeded even in STV, but there's that word PROBABLE. I don't think someone like Chuck Puchmayr would have though. As he had limited exposure in the bigger arena of Burnaby. Either way, to me, its quite simple. Anything and I mean ANYTHING that takes away ASSURED representation of a riding that already has representation in the legislature is DEAD WRONG, and clearly the majority of the voting public agree with that assertion. The Greens are just pissed off that their one big issue, the one thing that they hold out hope for in terms of getting elected or someone in the legislature, was turned down by the voters of the province, those people who care enough to take the minute it took to go out and be heard. And standing on the sidewalk calling for Carole James resignation does nothing to further their case.
So its left to the Greens to roll up their sleeves, and work hard within the rules as they exist to try and get someone elected to some level of government. Much like other fringe parties have had to do. The electoral reform issue was decided. The people have spoken, and the vote cast. We've had almost 13 years of electoral reform talk and in the end, the electorate chose to stay the course. Their opinion should be respected.
You ARE joking, right? You really think your mla gives a shit about you if he knows you voted against him? I think dave is living in utopia. The Tyee said that ndp voters voted in favour of stv as did the greens. So who is representing their interests? (Apart from Savoe at federal level.). The ndp voters still want electoral reform. Shouldn't someone Represent them? shouldn't the ndp put electoral reform in its party platform.
Brian:
And regardless of their political stripe, the successful MLAs get one simple thing, you have to represent ALL your constituents, not just the ones that voted for you. For that fact ALL successful politicians get that. Those that don't, like Joyce Murray for example, find themselves out of a job the next election. The job of the MLA is to represent ALL their constituents in the legislature, and in New West's case that isn't just labour, but also small and medium size businesses and industries.
. The people have spoken, and the vote cast. We've had almost 13 years of electoral reform talk and in the end, the electorate chose to stay the course. Their opinion should be respected.
Either way, to me, its quite simple. Anything and I mean ANYTHING that takes away ASSURED representation of a riding that already has representation in the legislature is DEAD WRONG, and clearly the majority of the voting public agree with that assertion.
Really. Tell us all what is so sacrosanct about a bunch of boundaries drawn by Elections BC? Do you really believe they represent communities? A friend of mine lives in Saanich. Last election, she was in the riding of Victoria Hillside, represented by Rob Fleming. This election, the boundaries were redrawn and as a result, she is now a part of Oak Bay - Gordon Head. Her MLA is now Liberal Ida Chong. She didn't move - how could she suddenly belong to a different community? I'm not faulting Elections BC - they do the best they can with a system that makes very little sense.
Look at the riding of Chilliwack-Hope. Do you think that the residents of Spuzzum and Boston Bar feel a warm kinship with people in Hope and Chilliwack? Would they be offended if the boundaries were redrawn so that they were now part of Fraser-Nicola?
Anti-STVers whined that in the new "gigantic ridings", smaller communities would be dominated by larger ones. Excuse me but isn't that exactly what is happening today under FPTP?
But really, what difference does any of this make? In the 21st century, communities are not exclusively or even predominantly based on geography. It is normal for people to have closer relationships with someone in another part of the province than the next door neighbor. Yes, some issues are regional and some are local but until every tiny village can have its own MLA, there are going to have to be tradeoffs in terms of representation. Personally, I'd rather be able to appeal to someone who shares my values 500 miles away than the troglodyte around the corner.
The sad fact is that politicians and others (like Tieleman and Schreck) heavily invested in the status quo have used the issue of locality in the STV debate. They've used it to appeal to people's base instincts of tribalism and parochialism. It's fear-mongering at its worst.
And you, Keglerdave, should not be proud to be using this tactic.
Could I have both, please? At least the troglodyte around the corner knows where I live, and gets his votes and mandate from my local community. And I'd like my additional regional MLA to live 60 km away, not 800 km, if you don't mind.
Speak for yourself. Mine is.
Could I have both, please? At least the troglodyte around the corner knows where I live, and gets his votes and mandate from my local community. And I'd like my additional regional MLA to live 60 km away, not 800 km, if you don't mind.
And I'd like a Lamborghini, only I don't want to pay 200 grand and when I drive it at 300 km/h, I want it to be completely safe. And I'd like it not to have any negative impact on the environment.
Wilf, you don't always get what you want, particularly when it doesn't make any sense, given the prevailing limitations. If there is only one representative for an area, s/he isn't going to be able to share everyone's values.
OK. So explain this to me. What is it that is so special about your particular area that nobody else can comprehend? You can't relate to anyone who is not physcially close to you? And what does that mean for the residents of Spuzzum or Gold River or Atlin? Chances are pretty good they are nowhere near a constituency office. Does that mean they aren't able to participate in democracy? Should they be mounting supreme court challenges for their own MLA's so they can have their very own community trogolodyte too? And what about my friend? Shouldn't she be entitled to challenge Elections BC to be allowed to remain attached to the electoral community where she feels she belongs?
The claim that anti-STVers made about MLA's always being from the large communities is already true. Why isn't everyone panicking?
Could I have both, please? At least the troglodyte around the corner knows where I live, and gets his votes and mandate from my local community. And I'd like my additional regional MLA to live 60 km away, not 800 km, if you don't mind.
Speak for yourself. Mine is.
ReeferM
As odd as this might sound (and I don't think they're feeling too much of a chill in hell) I kinda agree with Wilf on this -- so long as the provinces and the country are geographically and demographically varied, "place" has an important place in representation. If the geography -- both human and physical -- of the country was essentially homogenous then I'd tend to agree with you a little more. Where there's a layer of heterogenous demography overlaid on a layer of heterogenous physical geography (a multi-layered heterogeneity) people matter and it matters where they are.
Multi-member ridings -- large enough to support a sufficient minimum DM (say 5 to 7) would likely minimize the arbitrary character of the boundary shifts whilst providing effective representation(and proportionality) on a relatively local basis.Better local representation, really.
Wilf likes this -- it's his ideal w.r.t. MMP. For the rest of us, just take away the unconstitutional SMP remnants, enhance the aggregated vote tally mechanism and you have the beginnings of a sufficient electoral system. It stops being "mixed"; it stops being MMP. In fact it's something very much like STV.
And when you have multi-member ridings with district magnitudes of sufficient magnitude and a preferential ballot you can vote for candidates on an individual basis that tend to reflect your values (and even vote for several candidates who variously reflect 'em to convey the subtleties of your values) and your party affiliation if necessary. And those candidates will also be the choice of fellow voters who share your values too. Representation will tend towards a value-based character rather than dogmatic one. Constituencies will be according to the way people think and what they think in a riding. In the end you get what you want -- disassociation with the trogodytes (whoever they are -- and everybody gets better representation. It's a non-zero sum game at that point.
What a load. Youre obviously more interested in blocking MMP than in any real electoral reform, Skeised. A whole week away and the line remains the same. Do tell, do you have any idea of the reasons and the values behind them that attracted so many Canadians to electoral reform in the first place? I'll take another look later tonight.
"A whole week away"... gosh, don't sell me short. I was first convinced of MMP's absolute insufficiency as a replacement for FPTP while I observed the OCA stumble around the issue of electoral reform in 2006.
I don't pretend to know what motivates other reformers. I can only speak to mine and my convictions.
I am open to persuasion but you'd have to actually present a case rather than just throw tomatoes [what a load, indeed]. You'd have to be much more persuasive, for instance, than Wilf who has yet to lay out convincing arguments and we've been arguing since 2007. You'd have to start talking about first principles -- like the pertinent Charter rights you feel are so much in dispute that the Quebec challenge can't possibly succeed.
But you won't so... nice to hear from you again.
I'm not interested in trying to persuade someone who's mind is already set, or interested in your nearly hopeless court challenge, especially with your rejecting other forms of PR and refusing to see why proportionality is one of the main arguments against what we have now. I just wanted to see after all this spilled ink if you understood what motivated other electoral reformers, or why many were less than thrilled by the STV form chosen but came around to it anyhow as a matter of broader principles. Since youve as much as admitted youre not part of the movement with your "I don't pretend to know what motivates other reformers. I can only speak to mine and my convictions." then there's really little reason to take you seriously on this subject. Just for your amusement though, here's a fairly complete list of the rationales given by most ER activists when they first started selling the idea to the public. (what sells people on an idea to begin with is one important democratic principle thats too often forgotten when no longer convenent, now more than ever)
Electoral reform through Proportional Representation was originally sold to BCers (like myself) on a number of related rationales, particularly during Adriane Carr's "Free Your Vote" initiative, but four points in particular were always central to the theme:
I think that still about sums it up.
Thanks for checking in.
If you look back through my posts I'm pretty sure you'll find that my theme has essentially and consistently been that PR is a necessary but not a sufficient condition for a truly fair voting system. That's what "PR is not enough" means -- PR by all means but as a part of a larger solution. You don't seem to have comprehended that.
What I'm after is more than what mere PR is capable of delivering. Your argument needs to convince me why I should settle for less.
Oh, and if "PR was supposed to" do all that you say, what does it really do?
See you in the funny papers.
I think some people have too pure ideas about pro rep. ordinary MMP is party pro rep. No other aspect of it is designed to be proportional or to give any personal choice to the voters. STV achives similar proportionality just by giving the voters true choice (with no strategic voting games needed) at the riding level and this proprotionality goes much deeper than just party ratios. In ireland, the greens generally get more seats than they should by first preference while sinn fein gets less. (This is the majority boycott on violent politics in action) I do not see it working as effectively in a mmp system. The hardliners will get seats in exact proportion to their hardline support.
I believe there is room to design a better mmp system. (Perhaps there is one out there already but not in use). The root of first past the post problems is single member ridings.
Nobody on a lower income can go to their fptp elected bc lib mla and seriously expect help on a health care or education issue. They must have someone else directly linked to their vote to go to. MMP has its greatest weakness in the fptp part of it. A minor change to this part of mmp and it can be a much better system.
Looking back at the bc referendum with the Tyee article as a pointer. BCSTV was rejected by bc lib voters because they wanted to maximise their vote and negate green and ndp votes over the long term. Selfishness won with some small help by tielmann an schreck. (NDP advertizing buget was about 28 million) Which is a lot really. If stv had come about, mla,s would be spending a lot of time working in their constituencys (like they do in ireland) so the big advertizing contracts might not be so needed. The money would be spent directly in the ridings.
No wondor ndp advertizers gurus took up the half million to do the nostv advertizing contract.
No wondor they defend the current system.
Just like the BClib voters, they feared for their income in the brave new world of pro rep.
They chose between ndp in government coalition (Pretty often probably) and current personal income over 100 grand.
No contest
Selfisheness won out.
Brian
"A whole week away"... gosh, don't sell me short. I was first convinced of MMP's absolute insufficiency as a replacement for FPTP while I observed the OCA stumble around the issue of electoral reform in 2006.
I don't pretend to know what motivates other reformers. I can only speak to mine and my convictions.
I am open to persuasion but you'd have to actually present a case rather than just throw tomatoes [what a load, indeed]. You'd have to be much more persuasive, for instance, than Wilf who has yet to lay out convincing arguments and we've been arguing since 2007. You'd have to start talking about first principles -- like the pertinent Charter rights you feel are so much in dispute that the Quebec challenge can't possibly succeed.
But you won't so... nice to hear from you again.
double post, sorry
Brian:
Of course the basic "sales" problem with MMP is that its main selling feature is that it keeps the local representation -- and typically a majority of 'em -- that people are familiar with... the exact kind of representation that is what we're all (well, mostly) fighting against.
If Wilf would propose a version of MMP with single member local seats that are elected fairly -- that for instance were guaranteed to represent a majority of the voters in that riding (this isn't the only way but it's the obvious one) -- then MMP would be a hard sell indeed. Nothing about it would be familiar.
Application of occam's razor suggests a mixed system is not optimal. Examination of MMP based on a yardstick of voter fairness takes it off the table.
How does Occam's razor imply a mixed system is not optimal?
In trying to design systems with competing requirements (like what we are doing with voting systems) mixed systems are very likely to produce optimal results.
Every jurisdiction is unique, this is a big reason mixed systems are on the increase around the world, as Jenkins points out "flexibility" is the key:
General Advantages of a Mixed System
109. A principal advantage of such a mixed system is its flexibility. According to the proportion of top-up members which is fixed upon, and according somewhat also to whether they are elected nationally, or from big regions, or from a more local grouping of constituencies, varying degrees of priority can be given to proportionality on the one hand and to the constituency link on the other. This flexibility has enabled the Commission to steer to a point closest to fulfilling all four of our terms of reference, which, as well as greater proportionality and the maintenance of a constituency link, are an increase in voter choice and stability of government.
Could I have both, please? At least the troglodyte around the corner knows where I live, and gets his votes and mandate from my local community. And I'd like my additional regional MLA to live 60 km away, not 800 km, if you don't mind.
Speak for yourself. Mine is.
ReeferM
As odd as this might sound (and I don't think they're feeling too much of a chill in hell) I kinda agree with Wilf on this -- so long as the provinces and the country are geographically and demographically varied, "place" has an important place in representation. If the geography -- both human and physical -- of the country was essentially homogenous then I'd tend to agree with you a little more. Where there's a layer of heterogenous demography overlaid on a layer of heterogenous physical geography (a multi-layered heterogeneity) people matter and it matters where they are.
Multi-member ridings -- large enough to support a sufficient minimum DM (say 5 to 7) would likely minimize the arbitrary character of the boundary shifts whilst providing effective representation(and proportionality) on a relatively local basis.Better local representation, really.
Wilf likes this -- it's his ideal w.r.t. MMP. For the rest of us, just take away the unconstitutional SMP remnants, enhance the aggregated vote tally mechanism and you have the beginnings of a sufficient electoral system. It stops being "mixed"; it stops being MMP. In fact it's something very much like STV.
And when you have multi-member ridings with district magnitudes of sufficient magnitude and a preferential ballot you can vote for candidates on an individual basis that tend to reflect your values (and even vote for several candidates who variously reflect 'em to convey the subtleties of your values) and your party affiliation if necessary. And those candidates will also be the choice of fellow voters who share your values too. Representation will tend towards a value-based character rather than dogmatic one. Constituencies will be according to the way people think and what they think in a riding. In the end you get what you want -- disassociation with the trogodytes (whoever they are -- and everybody gets better representation. It's a non-zero sum game at that point.
I didn't say geography had no place in the system - I said it shouldn't predominate. By design our system allows for representation solely based on geography (political parties are an unofficial add-on). This doesn't make sense in the 21st century.
But I noticed that nobody has addressed the fundamental question I asked about why people feel so strongly that they need a "local" representative. Perhaps nobody has a logical answer? This issue seems to have gut-level appeal for people when the subject of voting systems arises but it doesn't seem to make that much difference when people actually vote. If it did, "parachute" candidates would always get solidly thumped. But, as Dennis Pilon points out, people overwhelmingly vote the party. In the absence of rationale, I'm forced to conclude this is mostly about tribalism.
I also noticed that nobody bothered to address any of the issues with current "local" representation - how the lines of a riding are arbitrarily drawn and redrawn without consultation of the people concerned, how many small towns will never have the type of "local" representative you claim is so vital, how Wilf's magical 60 km radius isn't being adhered to even today.
All systems have trade-offs. If we want to improve the system, all of the criteria must be open for logical, rational discussion.
How does Occam's razor imply a mixed system is not optimal?
In trying to design systems with competing requirements (like what we are doing with voting systems) mixed systems are very likely to produce optimal results.
Easy.
William suggested that if you have two solutions to a problem, the simpler more elegant one should govern and is most likely the correct one.
We currently suffer under a system whereby each riding is poorly represented. Mixed systems let the poor system to continue to function for the most part -- and continue to generate errors -- and attempt to apply an additional corrective vote to cancel out the errors.This is an extra layer of complexity -- two different votes instead of one.
A more elegant system would simply use an election process that achieved fairness (or whatever the goals) with a single consistent election process that didn't generate the errors in the first place -- like STV.
Think of it this way. SMP ridings are shooting holes in our election "boat". MMP lets the hole-making continue and relies on patching (some of) the holes each trip. STV operates by not making holes that need to be fixed. Conceptually, it's a more elegant solution... aside from being more fair and equal for and between voters. A mixed system -- by which we mean MMP -- produces inherently unequal representation for voters -- hardly optimal.
You mention competing requirements -- what do you suppose these are?
But I noticed that nobody has addressed the fundamental question I asked about why people feel so strongly that they need a "local" representative. Perhaps nobody has a logical answer? This issue seems to have gut-level appeal for people when the subject of voting systems arises but it doesn't seem to make that much difference when people actually vote. If it did, "parachute" candidates would always get solidly thumped. But, as Dennis Pilon points out, people overwhelmingly vote the party. In the absence of rationale, I'm forced to conclude this is mostly about tribalism.
I also noticed that nobody bothered to address any of the issues with current "local" representation - how the lines of a riding are arbitrarily drawn and redrawn without consultation of the people concerned, how many small towns will never have the type of "local" representative you claim is so vital, how Wilf's magical 60 km radius isn't being adhered to even today.
All systems have trade-offs. If we want to improve the system, all of the criteria must be open for logical, rational discussion.
Actually, I thought I did. Perhaps I can amplify it a little though.
Representational democracy is a system of proxies; proxies for particular people, particular constituents. Particular people live in particular places that have a material bearing on their lives, livelihoods, interests and concerns. Even people who could live and work "anywhere" actually do live somewhere specific and the fact that we exist in a hetergenous context -- and a dynamic one at that -- means they each have particular local interests.
It's one reason why the local proportionality (read better representation on a local level) of STV is attractive. One of the things that makes MMP deficient is the vagueness of the relationship between particular voters and winners of the lists (though Wilf wants regional lists to make his preferred version of MMP be more like STV in this regard)
People overwhelming vote for the party not because that's necessarily what they want to do but because the system is rigged to the extent that that's pretty much all they can do. STV facilitates a significantly greater choice and expression of mandate by adding the ability to vote for individuals. And people matter a lot. Our representatives should not be party automatons. Even if the present system encourages then to behave that way they are individuals. Who we pick to represent us matters. We need that capability.
I wouldn't say that the voting system is the only reform required to remediate our democratic deficit. Addressing the riding boundary proceses you mention are grist as are any number of other changes.
Skeiseid Said:
"""As odd as this might sound (and I don't think they're feeling too much of a chill in hell) I kinda agree with Wilf on this -- so long as the provinces and the country are geographically and demographically varied, "place" has an important place in representation. If the geography -- both human and physical -- of the country was essentially homogenous then I'd tend to agree with you a little more. Where there's a layer of heterogenous demography overlaid on a layer of heterogenous physical geography (a multi-layered heterogeneity) people matter and it matters where they are.
Multi-member ridings -- large enough to support a sufficient minimum DM (say 5 to 7) would likely minimize the arbitrary character of the boundary shifts whilst providing effective representation(and proportionality) on a relatively local basis.Better local representation, really.
Wilf likes this -- it's his ideal w.r.t. MMP. For the rest of us, just take away the unconstitutional SMP remnants, enhance the aggregated vote tally mechanism and you have the beginnings of a sufficient electoral system. It stops being "mixed"; it stops being MMP. In fact it's something very much like STV.
And when you have multi-member ridings with district magnitudes of sufficient magnitude and a preferential ballot you can vote for candidates on an individual basis that tend to reflect your values (and even vote for several candidates who variously reflect 'em to convey the subtleties of your values) and your party affiliation if necessary. And those candidates will also be the choice of fellow voters who share your values too. Representation will tend towards a value-based character rather than dogmatic one. Constituencies will be according to the way people think and what they think in a riding. In the end you get what you want -- disassociation with the trogodytes (whoever they are -- and everybody gets better representation. It's a non-zero sum game at that point."""
I totally understand this comment, and agree with it. The solution for finding and promoting a successful electoral system will come from the ability of linking that new system with the discovery and understanding that voters will eventually come to recognize as what they are looking for when they vote. We know they want change, they just can't find what they are looking for. But they will.
I thought I would check in and see where the debate has gone since the referendum.
It is interesting to see how those who support MMP are trying to twist the STV defeat into an endorsement for MMP??? That appears to be a huge leap of faith and will continue to the be an issue that plagues electoral reform into the future. Even in defeat STV scored higher than MMP has ever scored in a referendum. The longer the debate the more resounding the defeat will be for MMP in the future as clearly a second look brings recognition that MMP moves political power away from the voter and also reduces the influence of values being attached to your vote as described by skeiseid.
MMP supporters should spend more time finding out how to build true support for a specific model of MMP that they believe is acceptable to Canadian voters, instead of laying claim to false mandates that don't exist.
Canadian voters are looking for ways to vote strategically to avoid another minority government according to polls. Chances of them being successful is very remote. If they do try to vote strategically they will vote even stronger to geographic alliances which will net an even more polarized national parliament.
Things could get worse before they get better.
Electoral reform must evolve past the MMP/STV debate and look deeper into the underlining values shared by larger numbers of voters and build the new system from those values. Not an easy task by any means.
Reading many of the threads since the referendum is not reassuring to me that electoral reform will continue to move forward and find those common values to build from. The opposite is happening................
All of you need to take a breathe and review if the position you are taking is really advancing electoral reform.
I'll check back out.........
AT
AT:
Thanks for weighing in.
I think we're more or less in agreement. I'm a first principles / yardstick guy. I'm for whatever measures up.
Actually, I believe that it isn't that hard to discuss basic values.. first principles. I figure that the BC-CA must have done this at some level to arrive at the result you did. That's very hopeful.
Also hopeful is the Charter challenge -- having FPTP determined to be unconstitutional on the basis of our Charter rights will frame the discussion exactly as you've described... and necessarily so.
Don't be a stranger.
Of course the basic "sales" problem with MMP is that its main selling feature is that it keeps the local representation -- and typically a majority of 'em -- that people are familiar with... the exact kind of representation that is what we're all (well, mostly) fighting against.
Good grief! You're fighting against local representation? What the hell are you for? I've argued against Wilf many times in the past but you are just foolish. You want to know why people want a local rep? It's so they don't have to travel hundreds of miles to get a response to something that's important to them -- something having to do with land use or water rights or basic government vs. individual problems. You, and the others, who have denigrated this during the STV debate are obviously know-it-all punks who have never ever had to deal with government and do not understand the role of an MLA. In fact, I doubt you have ever even tried to communicate with an MLA.
And, let me say, to those using "elegance" as an argument: there is nothing elegant about STV, nor MMP for that matter. These are mechanisms to count votes. How elegant can that be?
Finally, all parties increased their support for the status quo in the last BC referendum. One question: why did the Liberals shift so far away from a Yes vote? During the first referendum, right wing outfits like the Canadian Taxpayers Federation actively worked for STV. In the recent vote, they didn't. I noticed the right wing shift against STV in the run up to the referendum, but I've not been able to pin down why. Was it because the Right discovered that STV does not, in fact, weaken political parties? That was their main argument in referendum 1.0. I would like to hear thoughts on this.
Good grief is right.
You have to read the words and understand them. They're there for a reason.
What I said was familiar i.e. SMP local representation.
If it made any sense pragmatically one could suggest STV ridings that are identcal in size to the ones we have now. The legislature would be large and unweildy as hell but representation would be great. And it would be "local" but not SMP local.
Actually, I contact my federal and provincial representatives all the time. They share an office about two blocks away from where I live but mostly I email 'em.
Lots of things can be elegant; buildings, clothing, designs and hypotheses. Scientists value elegance, not to generate theories but to judge working hypotheses comparatively. Electoral systems are designs -- they can be elegant too. STV is elegant in the way it accomplishes many of the requirements of a voter-fair electoral system.But the reason to consider it is that it does address those requirements.
MMP doesn't fufil these requirements -- that's the reason it's a non-starter. Its Rube Goldberg design character is a strong indicator, though.
Thanks for checking in.
If you look back through my posts I'm pretty sure you'll find that my theme has essentially and consistently been that PR is a necessary but not a sufficient condition for a truly fair voting system. That's what "PR is not enough" means -- PR by all means but as a part of a larger solution. You don't seem to have comprehended that.
What I'm after is more than what mere PR is capable of delivering. Your argument needs to convince me why I should settle for less.
Oh, and if "PR was supposed to" do all that you say, what does it really do?
See you in the funny papers.
Its not "my argument", I was just reiterating all the standards points that most electoral reformers made from the beginning, and all I assumed understood if not agreed upon. You obviously have no idea what the movement is about. I have never said that electoral reform is the be all and end all either, but i am saying that its an essential element. Mostly I'm calling into question your comittment to any of it.
SKS: "Lots of things can be elegant; buildings, clothing, designs and hypotheses. Scientists value elegance, not to generate theories but to judge working hypotheses comparatively. Electoral systems are designs -- they can be elegant too. STV is elegant in the way it accomplishes many of the requirements of a voter-fair electoral system.But the reason to consider it is that it does address those requirements.
MMP doesn't fufil these requirements -- that's the reason it's a non-starter. Its Rube Goldberg design character is a strong indicator, though."
More broad assertions. Elegance is in the eyes of the beholder, but its hardly a point a constituional challenge can be based on. MMP is actually quite simple most ways, it just doesn't try to achieve all the different aims in one single process, thereby accomplishing none --except perhaps handing over permanent power to a thin minority who doesn't understand that the right to join or form parties and choose our local reps is essential to almost all functioning democracies. If they fall short they fall short for reason that the electoral process can't by itself address. Congratulations though, dismissing better local representation not only eliiminates your support for almost every ER "value", as originally made, but also contradicts one of the standard arguments that "anti-party" STVers once used.
And FYI, "emailing" a local member isn't an option for all contituents and maybe less effective than other more direct means, especially if your member doesn't even pass through your community on their way to work.
Erik:
If you're questioning my willingness to just go along with the crowd like a lemming and suspend my critical thinking process you've got it exactly right.
I'm not committed to belonging to "the team" -- I'm committed to working to achieve the best end result for the electoral reform process.
And it's clear you've let your dogma cloud your perception of what I've been saying. Or else you couldn't possibly be carrying on the conversation the way you have been.
That's OK. Wilf is fun to argue with, too, on occasion. Unproductive, but fun.
SKS: "Lots of things can be elegant; buildings, clothing, designs and hypotheses. Scientists value elegance, not to generate theories but to judge working hypotheses comparatively. Electoral systems are designs -- they can be elegant too. STV is elegant in the way it accomplishes many of the requirements of a voter-fair electoral system.But the reason to consider it is that it does address those requirements.
MMP doesn't fufil these requirements -- that's the reason it's a non-starter. Its Rube Goldberg design character is a strong indicator, though."
More broad assertions. Elegance is in the eyes of the beholder, but its hardly a point a constituional challenge can be based on. MMP is actually quite simple most ways, it just doesn't try to achieve all the different aims in one single process, thereby accomplishing none --except perhaps handing over permanent power to a thin minority who doesn't understand that the right to join or form parties and choose our local reps is essential to almost all functioning democracies. If they fall short they fall short for reason that the electoral process can't by itself address. Congratulations though, dismissing better local representation not only eliiminates your support for almost every ER "value", as originally made, but also contradicts one of the standard arguments that "anti-party" STVers once used.
And FYI, "emailing" a local member isn't an option for all contituents and maybe less effective than other more direct means, especially if your member doesn't even pass through your community on their way to work.
The constitutional challenge has nothing to do with elegance... never said it did.
You misread/misunderstood... pretty much everything. [sigh]
Your posts do serve to illustrate the need to focus on first principle discussions and our rights such that we can reach some common understanding with respect to the essence of our democracy and what we can and should expect from it, so thanks for that.
SKS: "Lots of things can be elegant; buildings, clothing, designs and hypotheses. Scientists value elegance, not to generate theories but to judge working hypotheses comparatively. Electoral systems are designs -- they can be elegant too. STV is elegant in the way it accomplishes many of the requirements of a voter-fair electoral system.But the reason to consider it is that it does address those requirements.
MMP doesn't fufil these requirements -- that's the reason it's a non-starter. Its Rube Goldberg design character is a strong indicator, though."
More broad assertions. Elegance is in the eyes of the beholder, but its hardly a point a constituional challenge can be based on. MMP is actually quite simple most ways, it just doesn't try to achieve all the different aims in one single process, thereby accomplishing none --except perhaps handing over permanent power to a thin minority who doesn't understand that the right to join or form parties and choose our local reps is essential to almost all functioning democracies. If they fall short they fall short for reason that the electoral process can't by itself address. Congratulations though, dismissing better local representation not only eliiminates your support for almost every ER "value", as originally made, but also contradicts one of the standard arguments that "anti-party" STVers once used.
And FYI, "emailing" a local member isn't an option for all contituents and maybe less effective than other more direct means, especially if your member doesn't even pass through your community on their way to work.
The constitutional challenge has nothing to do with elegance... never said it did.
You misread/misunderstood... pretty much everything. [sigh]
Your posts do serve to illustrate the need to focus on first principle discussions and our rights such that we can reach some common understanding with respect to the essence of our democracy and what we can and should expect from it, so thanks for that.
Alright, back to this one. If you want to argue "first principles" Re Democracy then you have to establish first what you think they are then we could have proceeded on that level, but for now I'm still more interested in getting ProRep back on the public agenda again as that was once seen by most Electoral Reformers as one essential step, or at least I thought it was.
I guess I should "unveil" my own "big" idea which is actually quite simple and compact, but I think could have a fair chance of succeeding if others gave it a chance. Getting late and other topics I'd still like to get to, but maybe now is as good a time as any. I'll open another thread and see where it goes.
One question: why did the Liberals shift so far away from a Yes vote? During the first referendum, right wing outfits like the Canadian Taxpayers Federation actively worked for STV. In the recent vote, they didn't. I noticed the right wing shift against STV in the run up to the referendum, but I've not been able to pin down why. Was it because the Right discovered that STV does not, in fact, weaken political parties? That was their main argument in referendum 1.0. I would like to hear thoughts on this.
Since noone else took you up on this though, I will add that yes, I noticed the same shift by the centre-right, in the media as well, and that could well be one reason why. Another more prosaic one might just be that the rightwing is more securely unified now behind the biggest corporate welfare parties in Canada while the Greens remain focused on the NDP and the political centre.
First principles:
Ultimately, it boils down to this -- that citizens have the right to effective representation in government with respect to having a fair and equal voice and choice (votes) in parliamentary debates and decisions insofar and to the full extent as a representational system will allow. And they have a right to an electoral system that enables that to occur.
The electoral process must first and foremost be fair and equal to, for and between voters and the representatives chosen must carry forward with them into debates and votes in their parliament that basic fairness and equality. To accomplish this, each representative must be chosen by a fair and equal process and represent their constituents on a fair and equal basis. Fairness to parties follows inherently and necessarily from this basic fairness for voters. In that way, they will be responsible and accountable.
In terms of effectiveness of representation, the assembled representatives must reflect the realitiy of dynamic heterogeneity of a diverse demography overlaid on a diverse geography -- representatives must represent particular people in particular places.
And this isn't a first principle as much as it is an essential feature, but the electoral system must empower voters to choose the best people for the job.In a representative democracy, people matter.
That's probably not all but it's a good start. From these one can build a yardstick to measure electoral systems and pick one that will facilitate our rights in our democracy.
None of this should be news to anyone who's been reading me since 2007.
Ultimately, it boils down to this -- that citizens have the right to effective representation in government with respect to having a fair and equal voice and choice (votes) in parliamentary debates and decisions insofar and to the full extent as a representational system will allow. And they have a right to an electoral system that enables that to occur.
The electoral process must first and foremost be fair and equal to, for and between voters and the representatives chosen must carry forward with them into debates and votes in their parliament that basic fairness and equality. To accomplish this, each representative must be chosen by a fair and equal process and represent their constituents on a fair and equal basis. Fairness to parties follows inherently and necessarily from this basic fairness for voters. In that way, they will be responsible and accountable.
In terms of effectiveness of representation, the assembled representatives must reflect the realitiy of dynamic heterogeneity of a diverse demography overlaid on a diverse geography -- representatives must represent particular people in particular places.
And this isn't a first principle as much as it is an essential feature, but the electoral system must empower voters to choose the best people for the job.In a representative democracy, people matter.
That's probably not all but it's a good start. From these one can build a yardstick to measure electoral systems and pick one that will facilitate our rights in our democracy.
Yes, a very good start.
It follows from this accountability to voters that legislators representing a majority of voters will determine our laws and guide their administration.
It follows from these principles that citizens should not find it necessary to embrace negative or strategic voting -- to vote for a less-preferred candidate to block the election of one even less preferred.
To achieve these goals, we must remove barriers to the nomination and election of candidates from groups now underrepresented including women, cultural minorities, and Aboriginals.
I would add that we need political parties presenting democratically-nominated candidates.
As to electoral systems meeting this yardstick: STV does this well, in jurisdictions where they have enough MPs per citizen to allow for reasonably-sized multi-member districts.
Bavarian-style MMP with open regional lists is almost as good. It does not allow for inter-party transfers, but it does let voters vote for both the local candidate they like best (irrespective of party) and for their party and its regional candidate they like best. It does not allow for intra-party transfers, so it might generate odd results if too many voters cast "donkey votes" for the first name on the list, but the Bavarian regions seem to be real regions where the candidates are known, since the bonus for being the first name on the list is not as large as one might fear. It might be bad for women since even the SPD's "zippered lists" will not guarantee women get elected, but in fact the women seem to be well-enough known that they get elected despite the open-list system. As BC-STV fans kept saying, 90% of Canadians want to see more women elected, so if the parties nominate them, we'll vote for them. Even conservative Bavarians do this to some extent, less so than Canadians would. And the German 5% threshold might work against new parties while STV allows voters to vote for new parties with no fear of wasting their votes, but in the last Bavarian election a new party won seats for the first time.
Hi Wilf
Yes I believe that what I've suggested is a good start. But, as always, you and I part company right away as you insist on only playing lip service to the basics.
The thing of it is that mixed systems do not provide fair and equal representation for voters -- they only do so for parties. All representatives do not arrive at their posts on an equal basis and that's a necessary condition for translating voter fairness and equality into parliamentary fairness and equality... which is what the Charter should be enforcing.
And MMP is inadequate w.r.t. representing the dynamic multi-layered heterogeneity that is the reality of our coutry and provinces (most of 'em)
These democratic nominations -- everyone would get to vote or just party members?
If we're going for a new system why go for "almost as good". Is that really what you've been selling with MMP all along... second best? That's quite an admission.
I've always said the best model I know is Northern Ireland's STV, which has one MLA for each 16,600 people, in six-seater districts each with about 99,600 people. Three times as many MLAs per person as BC. In Ontario (and Canada), given one MP for each 122,000 people or so, a six-seater district with 732,000 people is facetious. A mixed compensatory model is necessary.
Hmm. You say "each representative must be chosen by a fair and equal process and represent their constituents on a fair and equal basis" and "the assembled representatives must reflect the reality of dynamic heterogeneity of a diverse demography overlaid on a diverse geography." If some MPs are elected by voters in a small district, while others are elected in a larger region, doesn't that reflect the interplay of those two principles?
Excellent question. Given the principle of democratic nominations, reformers could advocate democratic rules (open memberships, with fixed cut-off dates to prevent last-minute swarming of nomination meetings) or could advocate primaries for registered party supporters like American-style closed primaries, or could possibly advocate American-style open primaries (in which supporters of a party that has no real local nomination contest could vote in another party's primary for their weakest opponent to sabotage that party). Either of the first two sound democratic, although seeking a Toronto Regional nomination in a Toronto-wide primary would be an expensive proposition. Or there might be other options?
I don't see that. "Multi-layered" is a pretty good definition of MMP.
And self-absorbed ignorance defines the Great Unread.
Why not present them with something more easily understoood? Relativity, for instance?
A compensatory system is necessary only if one insists on a base system that makes errors that need correcting. Band-aid. Eliminating SMP ridings as the essential first design step makes that argument moot and a mixed system a solution without a problem.
Adequate representation may require more representatives.
No, adjusting the regions doesn't solve the problem we see where Liberals in BC don't get representation nor do conservatives in the GTA.
You are Wilf-ully misunderstanding and misrepresenting the meaning and import of the heterogeneity. You understood it back in 2007. The heterogeneity must be represented at each level or you accomplish the complex diversity in one throw -- MMP fails that by definition... unless you elimnate the SMP-style votes in the "local" ridings.
Remind me -- why are we talking about Bavaria??
What are the party rules about members belonging to other parties? Is that permitted, generally??
The world's only functioning open-list MMP system. The last review of MMP in New Zealand took a close look at Bavaria for that reason, but decided closed-lists were okay. However, NZ may be about to do another review.
Where in your principles does it define single-member ridings are forbidden? Does it also say that two-member STV districts are forbidden? Three-member? Must all districts be the same size? Northern Ireland STV says yes as does Tasmanian; southern Irish STV says no as does Australian Capital Territory.
Why?
Here, we agree. But do you think voters want a House of Commons with 1,848 MPs?
I'm not sure I follow. Federally, in 2008 with the votes as cast a regional open-list MMP model would give BC Lower Mainland Liberal voters five MPs, not four. Maybe Raymond Chan or Brenda Locke? And BC Interior and Vancouver Island Liberal voters two MPs, not just one. Maybe Diana Cabott from Kelowna? And City of Toronto Conservative voters would have elected five MPs, not none. Maybe John Carmichael, Joe Oliver, Rochelle Wilner, Axel Kuhn and Patrick Boyer? And 2006 was much the same.
In American closed primaries, no. In Canadian parties, I know the NDP does not permit members to belong to other parties, but I am not positive about the other parties.
What I've done here is a first foray of principles which should guide the development of a comprehensive set of objectives that define a yardstick for measuring candidate systems. It ain't complete... yet. I have always hoped for constructuve input from the stakeholders... something that posters from you in 2007 and Eric this year have been unwilling to contribute to.
If single member ridings were adequately serving our needs for representation then we wouldn't be attempting to reform the system would we. In fact, though, the diversity of demography overlaid over a diverse geography -- the heterogeneity -- makes mere single member ridings next to useless as a representative mechanism. Even a majority election leaves almost half of the electorate out of the discussion of business in parliament. Voting can be by a simple majority but discussion -- the other (more important) half of parliamentary business -- demands to hear all voices. Anything less is unacceptable.
As our history evidences, the present system filters out our potential for expressing our intent and weakens the mandates we hand our representative to the point where the degree of disconnect makes representation pretty much totally ineffective from the voters point of view.
I entirely agree. We need to give all voters effective votes, which includes letting them have a voice in parliament. Including Alberta Liberal voters, Saskatchewan NDP voters, Toronto Conservative voters, Ontario Liberal voters outside the GTA, Quebec federalist voters, Green Party voters everywhere, and the list goes on.
That's a non-sequitur. Political scientists have found for decades that a mixed compensatory system provides the best of both worlds, combining local representation with full representation, and combining personal accountability with party-proportional representation. That's why the Germans called it "personalized proportional representation."
Your principles statement was pretty complete, but I thought I expanded on it helpfully above.
Non-sequiter? Hardly.
The effectiveness of a representative democracy is reduced with each SMP representative elected. No amount of compensation makes up for that.
As important w.r.t. the quality and efficacy of representation is that voters are able to pick the best representative (person) from a reasonable range of candidates -- not just accept the lone candidate offered by each party. This applies to every representative. This happens naturally and inherently with STV but you knew that.
Now if you change out SMP to allow multiple candidates from each party to be on the slate and ensure a majority in each election or demonstrate a direct connection between the voters not represented via that local-riding election and their representative then...
And with respect to your contribution to the first principles, thanks. The first doesn't necessarily follow but if the parliament is truly representative then a majority vote there will reflect the intent of the electorate and respect our mandate. Ensuring fair, equal and effective representation translates into so much else that we value. As a secondary-level principle obviating the need for strategical voting is yardstick-worthy (although don't you think that will still occur in the remaining SMP elections of an MMP system??).
By the way, what's your take on productive avenues for action? I notice that you've had nothing to say about that.
"By the way, what's your take on productive avenues for action? I notice that you've had nothing to say about that."
Bringing the above considerations to a public aching for a purer democratic form of representation, a public that has been worked over by big-budget opponents - a political afterthought.
"By the way, what's your take on productive avenues for action? I notice that you've had nothing to say about that."
Bringing the above considerations to a public aching for a purer democratic form of representation, a public that has been worked over by big-budget opponents - a political afterthought.
Sorry... whatever do you mean? In English, please.
That's where I thought you were at in the real world of politics.
I think I'll just get on the Jefferson Airplane, then.
Wonderland.
Or I really am in the funny papers now. [sigh]
say goodnight Gracie....
But that's just what happens with two-ballot MMP. In New Zealand as many as 35% of voters vote for a local candidate other than the local candidate of their preferred party. Voters in Ireland have notoriously weak party loyalties, but New Zealand voters seem to be matching them.
Open-list (Bavarian style) does that at the regional level, just as STV does at the regional level. The voters not represented by their local MP have a direct connection to the regional rep of the party they voted for. In STV, if he or she was not their first choice, at least they (presumably?) made him or her their subsequent preference. In open-list MMP, if he or she was not their regional choice, at least they (presumably?) wanted to be represented by a regional rep of their preferred party. Not perfectly direct? Direct enough.
Non sequitur. In a six-seater STV district, you are effectively represented by, hopefully, one of the six (unless your preference went to the seventh candidate who lost on the final count.) But you are certainly not effectively represented by most of them. Now, if some of the MPs who don't represent you are elected from a single-member riding within the region, what have you lost?
No, not with the two-ballot model, as noted above. You can vote for whom you like on the local ballot. It has no consequence for your party. No need for strategic voting.
Currently under consideration.
While you are considering, actively support the Charter Challenge... and support it in any event. It's worthy.
Voting in your "local" against your party certainly has consequences for the party. Or should.
In a DM>1 riding where representatives are elected through aggregation of ranked preferential ballots there's no reason not to regard all of the successful candidates as your representative team. You can approach any one or all of them to address your concerns -- because your vote very likely contributed to their election if you've bothered to complete it. If you're strictly a party guy, you can approach only those from your party who got elected (maybe only one for you NDPers) but why limit your parliamentary leverage?
If you can only see an STV-type election producing one viable effective representative per riding for any given voter then I'm not surprised (still not surprised -- we've had this conversation before) that you don't see its particular value. Aggregated preferentials are so much more expressive w.r.t. platforms, issues, candidate qualities. We suffer from a lack of communication of our intent. This helps address that lack in a way that mixed SMP+lists cannot approach.
Amazing, you once again avoided addressing any of the others arguments and yet act like youve made a deciding point. Unlike Wildfred, I don't see your list of first principles as much more than a bunch of bland truisms with little or no substance or evidence that yopu understand the democratic principles behind them. I will say that MMP meets all of them except perhaps the last, but you still cling to the notion that system which is weaker on all counts is somehow superior. Fine, thats your choice. One last question for you from me.
"skeiseid wrote:
What are the party rules about members belonging to other parties? Is that permitted, generally??In American closed primaries, no. In Canadian parties, I know the NDP does not permit members to belong to other parties, but I am not positive about the other parties. "
Can you even tell me why you think the NDP restricts party membership to those who aren't members of other parties?
No, it should not, and does not. That's the whole point of two-ballot MMP. That's the very reason why Germany switched to it, from the original one-ballot model, back in the 1950s: it creates more personal accountability for the local MP. With the one-ballot model they voted for the party and, of necessity, for its sole local candidate and for its entire regional list. With the two-ballot closed-list model you vote for the local MP separately, dumping a dud of your party, or rewarding a star of another party, as you see fit, without affecting the party make-up of the House (the parties that will be in government). And with the two-ballot open-list model you vote for one member on the regional list, not the entire list.
You can approach as many as you wish, yes, under STV or under MMP. But as you noted above, "the present system filters out our potential for expressing our intent and weakens the mandates we hand our representative to the point where the degree of disconnect makes representation pretty much totally ineffective from the voters point of view. Citizens have the right to effective representation in government with respect to having a fair and equal voice and choice (votes) in parliament" which a majority of today's voters are denied. So the representative you didn't want to represent you under winner-take-all will still not be someone you want to represent you under STV or under MMP. There may be one slight difference: under STV, even the guy you most dislike may try to appeal to you for your fourth (or so) preference. But you aren't likely going to buy his claim to want to represent you, any more than you buy his claim to represent you today under winner-take-all. Giving every voter an effective representative of his or her choice means you get one or more representatives who actually wants what you want and agrees with your values. Yes, you don't need to restrict your leverage to the candidate or party of your first choice. Does this mean you are somehow now represented by the whole "team", even the one you most dislike? Surely not.
Yes, you may find more than one friendly MP under STV, especially in a six-seater. Just as Bavarians in the most conservative regions still find two SPD regional MPs representing them.
Wilf:
This is devolving a bit into a partisan discussion -- that's my fault.
The reason for insisting on candidate choice within party votes for every position is to provide a mechanism for choosing the best person for the job and to provide voters with a means of expressing their views on policy and issues. This also adresses the party-vrs-candidate dilemma.
In short -- people make up parties and parliaments: every group is (perhaps subtlely) changed by each change in membership -- voters should be able to choose particular people with their particular takes on policy and issues and to do so without compromisiing expression of their party preference. The resultant parliament should be more connected to the intent and will of the people and therefore possess a stronger more articulate mandate. Responsibility and accountability to the constituency is made stronger as well -- each representative takes a constituent mandate both into the parliament and into the party. This is all good or voters and for parties.
Using a preferential ballot with aggregated counting in ridings with DM>1 facilitates this such that most every voter can say he/she had a hand in electing the slate of representatives for their riding. And voters can express themselves more powerfully across the board on big issues -- like the environment. Sure, some representatives will be less helpful than others on certain issues and some voters will have one (or less) representatives who reflect their values (but these people still have stronger opportunity to express their views) but basically you now have a caucus in parliament.
Voting needs to be a much more articulate activity. Perhaps the next yardstick components are a) to maximize the expression of voter intent and b) to maximize the bonds of responsibility and accountability between voter and representative.
I think we're doing better than the OCA did in defining objectives.
Closing for length.