Did NDP-Liberal vote-splitting deliver the PCs a majority in Ontario?

Mr. Magoo wrote:

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This will always ensure that the winning candidate has an actual majority support.

Doesn't it acheive that by arbitrarily reducing the options to two, in the final round?  That would seem a very mathematical, or technical, way to say "the majority has chosen".

Uh, yes.  Mathematics enters into it.

It is the system I prefer.  Germany’s second.

Mr. Magoo wrote:

Vote splitting is when the Judean People's Front and the People's Front of Judea divide up the same pool of voters who support Judean peopleness. 

The NDP and the Liberals are and always have been quite different parties.  Sure, supporters of either could have "voted strategically", but if they didn't then that doesn't mean that they somehow "split" the vote.

I think vote-splitting between two parties is not about the similarity or difference between the two parties, but instead it is about how their voters tend to prefer either of them over another party or other parties. No matter how similar or different they are from each other, vote splitting would not occur in an FPTP election if the NDP and Liberals were the only parties competing. FPTP's inability to function properly in elections with more than two candidates is why ranked voting is often used instead of FPTP in single-member elections. PR is another way to overcome the limitations of FPTP in multi-candidate elections. FPTP is an anachronistic two-party system from when Tories and Whigs were pitted against each in two-party elections.

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Perhaps the OLP would have a different view of PR in their present situation. 

This should not be why we choose (or they support) PR.  IIRC, that was part of the problem with the PR referendum in B.C. -- it was an assumed "answer" to a specific situational problem.  When that problem had gone away by the time of the second referendum, support for that "solution" dropped below even 50+1.  People didn't support PR on its own merits, they supported it to punish a party they thought hoodwinked them.  That's not a good enough reason to change electoral models 151 years later.

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If they can’t agree on PR, try semi-PR.  It doesn’t have to be all or nothing.

It seems like among existing PR supporters, it does have to be all or nothing.  I've seen it asserted that PR has failed on ballots in BC and ON in large part because the "flavour" on the ballot was not to everyone's liking (STV instead of MMP, or MMP instead of STV) even as either was surely leagues ahead of FPTP.  Best ask current PR supporters whether ANY  of the PR models are necessarily more supportable than FPTP.

Mr. Magoo wrote:

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FPTP is an anachronistic two-party system from when Tories and Whigs were pitted against each in two-party elections.

Agreed.

But suggesting that the NDP and Libs should join together to stop the PCs (or, the NDP and PCs to stop the libs, or the PCs and Libs to stop the NDP) is just a de facto attempt to return to that two party system.  Our electoral model may be designed for such a system, but given that the majority of Canadians support one or the other of the two original parties, folk still seem to like it.

 

I agree that for good reason the NDP and Liberals are not joining together. If we keep FPTP I think we'll just have to continue to accept the things that come with FPTP in Canada like, giving the right a structural electoral advantage, vote splitting, strategic voting, strategic voting campaigns, calls from many quarters on the left to establish PR, disproportional representation, right wing governments opposed by the majority, etc.... Luckily it seems that most of the political parties in Quebec are going to be supporting MMP during this fall's election there.

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In 2007, voters in Ontario were completely clueless on what they were voting for.  70% of voters were not familiar with the proposed MMPR, according to an Environics poll.

Huh.

But 100% of voters were disillusioned with the current system and wanted change, said PR supporters.

Could they have Googled it?  Would that have brought them up to speed on something so important to them?  Or, whose job is it to inform people about something apparently important to them?

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and no one educated the public

Then why would the public have been disgruntled?

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like, giving the right a structural electoral advantage, vote splitting, strategic voting, strategic voting campaigns, calls from many quarters on the left to establish PR, disproportional representation, right wing governments opposed by the majority, etc.

Whatever "advantage" the right might have is not due to the structure of our electoral system.

But if lots of NDP supporters in Ontario think they should buddy up with Kathleen Wynne, let them say so loudly and proudly.  I'll consider it, if I hear them say "yes, she's the progressive I've been waiting to endorse!".

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Both the Liberals and the NDP run on very similar platforms

I see.

Any thoughts on why most NDP supporters and most Liberal supporters would disagree that they're the same?

This isn't something new.  Again, supporters of both sides seem to feel there's a meaningful difference, 47 months out of 48.

OK.  You seem to feel they're wrong to think there's a difference. But  you don't need to convince me; you need to convince THEM.  How do you plan to tell NDP supporters why they should have embraced Wynne?  Or, some other Liberal leader in the future?

Practice your speech on us.

Maybe it's time for the Liberals to close up shop. If they did my hunch is 70% would move to support the Conservatives and 30% would support the NDP. The only time the Liberals are progressive is during election campaigns or when they are being pushed by the NDP.

Just more Liberal talking points.

Liberals are actually nowhere near as progressive as they have conned Canadians into believing they are. 

The difference between Conservatives and Liberal is as great as the difference between Liberal and NDP. The splitting propaganda is just that -- assumptions that are false that one party is just like another.

This of course raises the other problem which is the one of merger. People complain of provincial NDP being too much like the Liberals and the same ones talk of merger and winning. They forget the essential dynamic which is that a party does not just reflect the supporters it IS the supporters. If you remove a party then its supporters will take the next best thing and by doing so change that. If you want the NDP to be the left party it is when the Liebrals exist -- then you need the Liberals to remain. The act of the Liberal party existing gives space for the "centrists" (or whatever you want to call them) to go. If the Liberal party went away those people would in  some cases join the Conservatives and in others the NDP -- bringing both closer to the centre. Both Conservatives and NDP supporters who want the Liberals to go away, should understand that the dynamic without them would utterly change those parties as well since the people do not disappear.

The idea for left NDP supporters is when the three parties are roughly equal leaving the left third a chance at power but not swamping their views with half of the third they imagine they would like to disappear.

quizzical wrote:

good pointing out by the Globe article a vote for the Liberals was a vote for Doug Ford.

they are the reason why ON will be a mess for another 4 years.

it sure did. and i did read the whole blah blah blah.

paraphrase the blah blahs and it's what you get.

SocialJustice101 wrote:

Sean in Ottawa, if vote splitting is a myth, why do parties use ranked ballot internally for leadership races?

There are significant differences between all three main parties.   But the vote splitting part is real in any First-Past-The-Post system involving more than 2 candidates.    In Australia, this is avoided by using ranked ballot.  In France, they have run-off voting.   In Germany, they use Proportional Represenation.   All of these 3 systems are better than ours, and they all minimize wasted votes.

Parties use ranked ballots for leadership becuase there can only be one leader and they boil it down. It makes no sense to do this if you want a representative legislature.

Parties do this based on a personal chocie of a single party's leader. It is not at all the same as an open election between people of different parties and ideologies.

I did not say that vote splitting never happens but to affect a result is extremely rare -- and the myth part is the part where people assume that all the voters of one party would have the same second chocie which we know is not true. It also presumes that we can know accurately which party is ahead in a tight election in each riding and do something about it. Mostly it is BS propaganda to push the voters of one party to another.

The biggest reason is that there is no reason to have this second choice voting since you can have a proportional legislature -- you cannot have a proportional single leader.

The ironic thing is that the right has unity, which is supposedly a leftist value, and the left has competition, which is supposedly a right-wing value. 

The question is whether the Liberals can recover to contender status, or stay in the basement for a century as happened to the British Liberal Party. For now the Ontario Liberal Party is around the same levels of support of the British Liberal Party. If this is the case, the Liberal vote will be more or less irrelevant, and the war will be between NDP and Conservative.

If the Conservative government is characterized by corruption, waste, inefficiency, and incompetence, then voters, no matter where they are, will pick the opposition party no matter what it is.