It’s time for an electoral reform uprising

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Originally posted by Threads:
[b]I've gotten the sense that (at least in Ireland), it's very, very difficult for a candidate to win with much less than half a quota on the first count.[/b]

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Difficult, but one of the exciting things about watching the count in an STV election is that nothing is impossible. One can say that, statistically, if you get 67% of a quota on the first count, you will likely be elected, but statistics don't determine STV winners. That's one reason why the Irish Greens have done so well in a model with 3-, 4- and 5-seaters: they tend to be the favourite second choice of most other party's voters.

But the all-time great winner was Jane Morrice in 1998 in Northern Ireland, who had 4.8% on the first count, one-third of a quota.

The surprise Northern Ireland Women's Coalition member won miraculously in the least diverse area in Ulster. The posh suburban and seaside North Down stretches from Belfast to Bangor. The only area where Sinn Fein did not run, it is only 8% Catholic, although Catholics provided her crucial victory margin. North Down had sent five men to the Forum (two UUPs, one Alliance, a Paisley man, and hardline Westminster MP Bob McCartney), but this time it saw four serious women candidates pull 21.3% of first-count votes.

A former BBC journalist, she had been head of the European Commission Office in Belfast. Perhaps she had made a better impression than she realized when she got 3% of the vote running for Parliament in 1997 against McCartney.

Morrice and Alliance's Eileen Bell, a District Councillor, both got in. Morrice not only stole the fifth seat from Paisley, but the UUP picked up the sixth seat. McCartney even tried another woman District Councillor, Elizabeth Roche, as his running-mate, almost getting a second seat. Yet in the end McCartney's home sent five pro-agreement members to the Assembly with him, reversing the trend in most other parts of Ulster.

Bob McCartney was almost the biggest winner of this election. At the Forum, the "well-tailored suburban extremist" had won only his North Down seat. This time his men got four more seats, picking up one new one and taking two from Paisley and one from the UUP. (However, his four followers soon left him to form their own Northern Ireland Unionist Party.)

Jane Morrice's chances looked very slim on the first count. She had only 1808 votes (4.8%), running 7th, behind even the SDLP's Marietta Farrell. Worse, a Paisley man was bound to overtake her once one of their two men dropped. On the second count she picked up only 28 votes from Bob McCartney's surplus, and saw Elizabeth only 38 behind her. On the third count Jane got 82 votes from five minor candidates. On the fourth count she fell to 9th place, picking up only 19 votes as the second Paisley man dropped. His transfers put the remaining Paisley man well ahead of her, and even put Elizabeth 61 votes ahead of her.

Jane's tide began to turn on the 5th count. Brian Wilson was a very popular independent member of the District Council from Bangor, polling even more votes for Council than Eileen Bell. A moderate, 45% of his voters made Alliance their second choice. Only 26 of them went to Elizabeth. Jane got a crucial 118 transfers from him, edging 30 ahead of Elizabeth. On the 6th count, after the PUP man dropped, 47% of his transfers went to the UUP. However, 182 (14% of his transfers) went to Jane, finally putting her 38 votes ahead of Marietta, in 7th place again. On the 7th count another very popular independent local councillor, Alan Chambers, who was in 10th place, had finally been eliminated. His supporters were more unionist, and 162 of them transferred to Elizabeth, but Jane got 228 of them. On the 8th count she got 18 from UUP surplus votes.

On the 9th count, the second Alliance candidate had dropped, and most of his 1972 votes transferred to his running-mate Eileen, electing her, but Jane got 242. On the 10th count she got 308 votes from Eileen's surplus, but still trailed Paisley's man by 185 votes. Jane, however, got only 58 transfers when Elizabeth dropped, with 2265 votes to transfer into the 11th count. If Paisley's man had got the rest, Jane would have been toast. However, Paisley's man got only 1253, while 472 went UUP and 474 had no further choices.

Finally, on the 12th count Marietta had dropped. Most of her 2458 voters would have named Eileen their second choice, and 470 of them refused to transfer farther. However, 1812 of them ranked Jane ahead of the unionists, putting her 413 ahead of Paisley's man, although still 475 short of a quota.

To her original 1808 votes, she had added 3090 transfers, about 74% of them transfers from women: 1812 SDLP, 550 Alliance, 346 from the two independents, 182 from the PUP, and 205 others. Just the way feminists hope STV will work. She even stood fifth, 105 ahead of the third UUP man.

Sadly, she could not repeat the miracle in 2003. In 2006 she was appointed as one of the NI representatives on the key EU advisory body, the European Economic and Social Committee.

[ 06 November 2008: Message edited by: Wilf Day ]

Torontoist interviews Jack Layton http://torontoist.com/2008/11/tall_poppy_interview_jack_layton.php

Quote:

The fifth and final part of your expectations for the Harper government is about democratic reform and changing the nature of the minority government situation. What does democratic reform mean to you?

"It means ensuring that when sixty-two percent of the people of Canada want change, they get it. That's what happened in this last election, and they didn't get the change they wanted. Only thirty-seven [percent] voted for Harper. Almost two-to-one people voted against him, and he's in power. South of the border, fifty-two percent of the people wanted change and they got it. So let's have an electoral system that gives effect to the will of the people instead of standing in the way of the will of the people.

Three elections in a row now—in fact, I think we can say four, if we add in the year 2000, maybe even more, but certainly those four—we've had less than forty percent of the people voting for a government, and yet that government gets the power. It's absurd, wrong, and totally undemocratic. Let's grab a hold of this—people can now see how dysfunctional it is—and let's bring proportional representation to Canada, so that political parties can run, they can lay out their program, people can vote for those parties, and their vote will not get essentially cast aside and disrespected by a result that puts in power the very party that was explicitly not the choice of the majority."

In the last election, three out of the five major leaders—you, Liberal Leader Stéphane Dion, and Green Leader Elizabeth May—were explicitly in favour of some form of proportional representation. Why do you think it was a complete non-issue, and has been a complete non-issue in campaigns, even though, for example, Senate reform continues to be a hot-button topic?

"Well, we certainly tried to push it. I think one of the problems has been these referendums that have failed—there have been four of them I think now, three or four—and they're not passing, so people are getting tired of it. But I'm saying, let's find a strategy to get the possibilities for democratic renewal to the forefront again."

So what's that strategy, do you think?

"Well, we had done some work when Ed Broadbent was part of our caucus in the 2004–2006 minority parliament, and we moved it fairly far along. A special committee was set up—we negotiated that into the Speech from the Throne, actually—and Ed and those on the committee brought it all the way back to Parliament. Their recommendations passed Parliament, which were that a special group of Parliamentarians was going to develop a model for proportional representation and bring it back to Parliament, and a group of citizens in an engagement process to identify the fundamental principles that should be at the root of any reform was going to be launched. And all this would have been brought back to the House of Commons to be considered and adopted. But then when Harper was elected, that entire process came to a halt. It hasn't been restarted, and we want to see it be restarted."

Talking about the political culture more generally, Prime Minister Harper has stated that one of his goals is to shift Canada's political culture to the right. Do you think he's succeeding in that goal?

"No, and in fact I think that more and more people are drawing inspiration from what they see happening with [US President-elect Barack] Obama south of the border [as opposed to] what they see happening here."

What do you think is missing from Canada's politics that is present now in the United States?

"A more democratic electoral system that translates the wishes and will of a people into the political system. Like I said before, fifty-two percent of Americans voted for change and they got it. Sixty-two percent voted for change here and we didn't. So we actually had more people who wanted to see change in Canada as a percentage than they did in the States, but yet we end up with a Conservative government because of our electoral system, which is completely warped and wrong."

But probably the key reason why that happened in the US is that they only have two major parties. So is that really a model for us? You've stated that proportional representation is the goal here, but in terms of the responsiveness to change, is the US really a model for Canada?

"I think proportional representation is the model for Canada, because we have a multi-party system and have had for a very long period of time in this country. It's part of our political culture here, going back many decades, and different parties come and go as a part of that process. But what we haven't had is an effective way to translate that process into seats in the House and reflect the democratic will of the people.

It's not that these models don't exist. They exist virtually everywhere else in modern democracies. We are not a modern democracy. We're using a system that was invented before the telephone — which was invented by a Canadian, or in Canada. We certainly make that plain. And, in fact, we've gone on to invent the BlackBerry here. We've gone through quantum leaps to perform in other areas, but we've left a system of representation in place from the Gutenberg era, including an unelected Senate, which is bad enough. But we have a first-past-the-post voting system that even the originators of that system in Britain have begun to replace, in terms of what's been going on with Scotland and Wales, and could well come to Great Britain itself. Who knows? But for heaven's sakes, let's get moving here."

Tommy_Paine wrote:

I think the problem with the lack of democratic reform in Canada is that the proponents of such are not nearly strident enough, and are not prepared to lay more on the line. 

As Larry Gordon said in the Rabble article that started this thread.

However, I just read a private-list comment by a political scientist who said:

Quote:

If we assume that sometime in the near future we will move toward some form of PR as a means of electing governments (a big assumption, but not a ginormous one I don't think . . . we're slouching toward it slowly), then the parties will have to learn to govern differently.  They will have to learn to govern in coalitions of interests around an agreed upon agenda.

"we're slouching toward it slowly" -- I love it. I'd rather slouch towards PR than slouch towards more one-party governments. Let's start a Slouch Movement.