B.C election aftermath part II

I checked the link. Valid votes in ridings range from 7,611 in one riding to over 29, 000 in another. Almost 4 times the voter power in the peace river south as in comox valley!    Democracy in BC is a joke and a half.   If you want a referendum that will pass and raise the voter numbers, how about one where equal numbers of voters  means equal representation?   No wondor people do not bother vote.  It is corupt and incompitent all the way through the system.

Politics101 wrote:

You can get up to the minute results on the Elections BC web site of the final vote tallies:

http://www.elections.bc.ca/docs/stats/2009-ge-ref/fc/GE-2009-05-12_Party...

In Delta South there are two independents so the total lead for Vicki is harder to determine without going inside the actual riding page.

Current lead for Liberals in Cariboo-Chilcotin is 94 votes

Maple Ridge - Pitt Meadows is complete and the NDP took the vast majority of the absentee vote and increased there margin.

One that is complete is Maple Ridge  - Mission which has tightened to less than a 100 vote victory for the Liberals - wonder if a possible recount might be in the works there.

"I'm just flabergasted at Maple Ridge-Mission, seeing as Marc Dalton is a complete loon."

95% of people just vote for the party and pay no attention to who the local candidate is.

Will there be a judicial recount there?

I see that NDP voters in Delta south voted for Huntingdon to keep Oppal out! Interesting, and I most likely would have done the same if I lived there.

Some interesting final analysis at Sasha's www.bc2009.com website and one interesting article about what the turnout would have been if only absentee and special ballots were counted.

remind wrote:

I see that NDP voters in Delta south voted for Huntingdon to keep Oppal out! Interesting, and I most likely would have done the same if I lived there.

But that's strategic voting!  I thought everyone on this board claimed it never works.

Politics101 wrote:

Okay let the cheering and guessing begin - Wally does down by 32 votes in Delta South - so who might be the next AG - presume that they will want a lawyer - I believe that there are only three among the Liberal caucus - Bill Bennett, Mike DeJong and Barry Penner.

Bennett is too much of loose cannon - DeJong may want to continue his work on First Nations treaties and does Penner want to give up the Environment portfolio which he seems to enjoy to take on the thankless job of AG.

So here is another scenario while unlikely can't be ruled out - given that you don't have to be elected to be in the cabinet - with Ed John being the last such case - he is re-appointed AG and the Liberals look for a safe seat to parachute him into in a by-election - would they suddenly find that the oldest member of their newly elected group suddenly becomes very ill and needs to step aside thereby allowing Wally to win a by-election in a safe seat.

To my knowledge - the oldest member of the Liberal Caucus is Ralph Sultan who is only 75 or so.

 

The most likely outcome in my opinion is for De Jong to do both AG and Aboriginal Affairs - Geoff Plant had the same combination during the first Campbell mandate and was able to cover off both jobs fairly well. No way that Bennett gets anywhere AG and Penner is very attached to the Environment portfolio.  Wally is finished with electoral politics and there would be a huge backlash if Gordo tried to pull a stunt like naming Oppal to Cabinet after he lost his seat (the Ed John appointment was a total desperation move by the Dosanjh NDP to try to win a Prince George seat and it didn't work at all).

Other Cabinet thoughts:

- Donna Barnett, Kash Heed and Terry Lakes are pretty certain to get Cabinet spots - Gordo will want to shore up MLAs in tight races/swing ridings.  Heed is a lock for Solicitor General and Barnett would be a good fit with Community Development (Krueger will get demoted to a Min of State or Parl Secretary gig if Lakes from the neighbouring Kamloops riding gets a full Cabinet post)

- The new Lib MLA for Comox (McRae? Not sure of the name) will get into Cabinet and Cantelon will return to the backbench - again, Comox is a swing riding and Parksville is a Liberal lock for the next few elections at least.

- There were significantly more women elected in 2009 than 2005, as well as more visible minorities and at least one person with a disability - Campbell will take a page from Jean Charest and appoint one of the most diverse Cabinets in Canadian history. 

RANGER wrote:

That's right, and independants don't have a hope in hell of getting elected under FPTP!

...and they'd have even less chance under PR systems like MMP.

Wilf Day wrote:

skeiseid wrote:

RANGER wrote:

That's right, and independants don't have a hope in hell of getting elected under FPTP!

...and they'd have even less chance under PR systems like MMP.

You surely know that Margo MacDonald, independent regional MSP for Lothians in the last House, was re-elected as an independent regional MSP in the last Scottish Parliament election, using MMP.

No I wouldn't. That's what we have you for!

I said there was less chance not no chance.

The math and logic are on my side, Wilf.

Skeiseid wrote:

No I wouldn't. That's what we have you for!

I said there was less chance not no chance.

The math and logic are on my side, Wilf.

Not so fast, Skeideid. I just did the math for a 5-member MMP Richmond/Delta district. (Based on the proposed BC-STV boundaries.) Assuming that the regional riding is divided into four single-member districts with one regional best runner-up seat and that the Liberals won three of the local seats and the NDP one local seat, we get the following results:

• 1) Liberals at 52.29% are due -.385 compensatory seats
• 2) The NDP at 29.82% is due +.491 compensatory seats
• 3) The independent, Vicki Huntington, at 9.85% is due +.493 compensatory seats
• 4) The Greens at 5.34% are due +.267 compensatory seats

On the basis of best remainders, Huntington wins the regional seat. Note that these calculations don't take into account the fact that she would probably pick up considerably more votes in her enlarged single-member South Delta riding. She wins the regional seat despite the fact that she gets no votes from the other three local districts. Of course, if the Liberals won all four local seats, the NDP would get the regional seat. Same if the Libertals won three local and Huntington the fourth. Presumably, Guy Gentner of Delta North would be the best runner-up on the basis of total votes or percentage of the votes.

Skeiseid, I'll refer to a comment by Wilf in another thread:

"The simplest of all proportional systems, and the most saleable in a conservative society, is near-winner MMP as used in the German province of Baden-Wurttemberg. No lists. No complex voting. You vote for your local candidate, which counts as a vote for that candidate's party as well. Just like FPTP, except that voters for an under-represented party get additional representation: that party's candidates in that region who came closest to winning their ridings are elected as regional MLAs.

Not my favourite system..."

The point is, in "near-winner" MMP why limit the regional seats to the parties? In this case, a strong independent won enough votes in her single-member riding to claim the regional seat. She won more votes than the NDP vote aggregated over four single member districts (and reduced by one quota of  20,248 votes). Whether NDP or independent, there is a question of legitimacy because the voters in only one of the four local districts got a chance to vote for the regional representative. Maybe that's why the B-W model hasn't been more widely adapted. Having said that, in two-vote MMP, why limit the regional reps to the parties. Each independent could have the option of running as a party of one - taking on the burden of running regionally as well as locally.

skeiseid wrote:

I said there was less chance not no chance.

The Northern Ireland Assembly, under STV, has one independent. Belfast City Council, under STV, has one independent. The Scottish Parliament, under regional MMP, has one independent. How so less chance?

skeiseid wrote:

You're assuming that an independent is a candidate and gets to be a party as well and thus can be afforded dual candidacy and attract regional votes too form the electorate at large?

In Scotland, yes.

In the first Scottish Parliament election in 1999, Dennis Canavan ran as a local independent in Falkirk West, and as a regional independent in Central Scotland. He got enough votes to win a regional seat. But he won the local seat. Of course that was subtracted from his regional win, so he only won once. But he was a very successful dual candidate.

In fairness I should add that some MMP fans in Ontario find it almost scandalous that Scotland lets independents do this.

The model I like, which Scotland doesn't yet have (the Arbuthnott Commission's recommendation, open regional list which I advocate, or possibly flexible regional list which I used to prefer until I realized it gets too complicated), would still let independents do this. I'm not worried about independents getiing elected. They are almost invariably people who got elected for a party, and became rebels with popular support, rather than Vicki Huntingdons or local celebrities.

A much more difficult question is anti-defection laws, which are said to be needed for PR but in fact are most commonly used in India under FPTP.  

skeiseid wrote:

But tell us, what are the rules in Canada (not Tasmania) for the creation of a political party? One that could appear on an MMP list?

That's two questions. You can check the current requirements for a party, which are very loose. No one has yet written the requirements to appear on a regional ballot. Some have proposed that you must have candidates in the majority of local seats in the region in order to be on the regional ballot. Undetermined yet.

skeiseid wrote:

Remind us, what were the rules in OCA-MMP for the requirements of parties to have candidates in the lists; did these parties have to be registered... or was there no mention?

No mention that I recall.

skeiseid wrote:

What happens to independents where dual-candidacy is not permitted?

That's the more common situation, they have to win locally -- which can happen.

skeiseid wrote:

In fairness you should add that a lot of Ontarians didn't like the notion of dual-candidacy and closed lists in "their" MMP design. They didn't find it just "scandalous"... they voted against it.

Some voted against closed lists. More voted against province-wide lists, if you look at the inverse correlation between support for MMP and distance from Toronto. I never heard of someone who voted against dual candidacy.

skeiseid wrote:

Basically what you're saying, in any event, is that for an independent not to be at a disadvantage in an MMP design, he/she/it must become a party and enjoy dual-candidacy. Otherwise, there are markedly fewer opportunities -- all things being equal, by the number of list representatives being elected -- for independents to run and win under an MMP system.

I suppose the Scottish independents I mentioned, along with the Grey Power man who won a regional seat that I didn't mention yet, might agree with you.

skeiseid wrote:

Party defection is a symptom of the problem with a system that combines the party vote and the vote for a representative into one. The solution is not anti-defection legislation but electoral reform that facilitates the voter to pick the best person for the job regardless of party whilst enabling that voter to remain "faithful" to his/her/its party too if they choose. Gee, Wilf, are there any electoral systems that do empower voters in this way? (Hint: MMP is not one of them)

Actually two-vote MMP does this best. If you vote under STV for a local star, with additional preferences for your party, it's quite likely that all 100 cents of your vote, or most of them, will be used up by your local choice. If your local choice is such a star that he gets two full quotas, then 50 cents of your dollar (half your vote) goes to your party. That happened exactly once in the last Irish election.

skeiseid wrote:

It's my understanding that for a party to appear on a ballot the party must be registered. That would mean that in order for an independent to appear on an MMP list (regional or otherwise) he would have to "become" a party and get registered. That's a lot of unecessary admin work. Silly, really... but necessary for what y'all claim to be true to be true.

In New Zealand, yes. In Scotland, Margo MacDonald was on the regional ballot.

skeiseid wrote:

Voters in Ontario didn't like the apsect of OCA-MMP that made the election of certain representatives a "given" -- they expressed that as being close to being appointments. This only occurs meaningfully in a system that features dual-candidacy in closed lists as riding losers can get elected in any event.

That's the problem with closed lists. It's just as bad even with dual candidacy banned.

skeiseid wrote:

The upshot is that an independent is typically at a distinct disadvantage in a mixed member system like... MMP.

Typically, yes. Depending what the rules are. In Scotland, no.

skeiseid wrote:

You clearly don't understand that in STV you can distinguish between a candidate you like against one you don't from the same party and thus make your vote count meaningfully as a choice between candidates. Funny how you missed that. Two vote MMP (isn't this the "more common" one?) doesn't let you do this for most of the candidates on any ballot -- for instance those majority running in the "local" SMP ridings. Logic fails you when you claim that MMP "does this best". It just isn't true.

You're changing the question. You said "electoral reform that facilitates the voter to pick the best person for the job regardless of party whilst enabling that voter to remain "faithful" to his/her/its party too if they choose." Of course, STV lets you pick the party's candidate you like best. If you want to vote for party A's candidate for MP while voting for party B to be the goverment, STV doesn't help you a whole lot. Two-vote MMP is just the ticket.

skeiseid wrote:

I've always said that I'm not married to STV but this one capability -- for voters to have a choice of candidates from a common party is one of the necessary features of an adequate electoral system. If STV cannot suffice, in your estimation, do you have an alternative? It would have to do all the other neat things like be reasonably proportional and fair to and between voters and plant representatives in the House on a equal basis s.t. most every member of the electorate has representation both for discussion and voting in Parliament that is equal on behalf of the voters.

Two-vote MMP lets candidates of the same party compete for your vote for regional MP. For local MP, you have a free choice of either your party's local candidate or another local candidate, so you can dump someone you want to dump. With STV you would rank someone else from the party higher, and then a candidate of a different party so that your vote cannot transfer to the guy you are trying to dump. Much the same result as two-vote MMP.

There are lots of things I like about STV: no wasted votes for parties that fall below the threshold. Cross-party transfers for women or for francophones or for farmers or for whatever other minority group may be more important than party. Regional thresholds, not provincial thresholds. Smaller districts than the 16-MSP districts of Scotland. If I lived in a community large enough to have seven MPs, STV would be my first choice, although not for the rather obscure merits that appeal to you. But I don't. (And even if I did, I would despair of explaining STV to a Canadian audience.)

This was the first time in a decade I've voted for someone other than the NDP (I voted Green). Were I in a swing riding I might have been more strategic, but my riding is NDP to the core.

I was deeply disappointed at the NDP campaign vs. the carbon tax.  Not because I think it's a great policy - it isn't - but because it is one of the only actual actions that have happened, anywhere.  Defeating the Libs with that calculated campaign in the platform would be a strong message to every party in Canada - do something about climate change and you will lose. 

Yes yes, I know the NDP platform had a 'better' enviro plan.  But the BC NDP have consistently ditched enviro issues at the first sign of trouble, and their pandering 'axe the tax' campaign was yet another example. 

I haven't decided whether or not to keep my membership or to make the jump to the Greens (unlikely), but I am currently only a grudging supporter.

"Defeating the Libs with that calculated campaign in the platform would be a strong message to every party in Canada - do something about climate change and you will lose. "

Actually, I think the message would have been "do something cynical, bogus and ineffective about climate change and you will lose". Instead the message is that you can have the worst environmental record in Canada build smoke stacks to the moon and more and more super highways - but as long as you put in a token thing called a carbon tax that won't make any difference at all - you get photgraphed shaking hands with Gov. Ah-nuld and all the ENGOs decide that all is forgiven because you gave tjem a bright shiny bauble of fool's gold.

RM:

I know you addressed your questions to Wilf -- and we're all sitting eagerly in front of our glowing LCD screens quivering in anticipation -- but I hope you don't mind me adding two cents in reply to a few of your questions. 

In the end, we may very well only accomplish some small measure of electoral reform and find ourselves settling for a version of PR to play with for a few decades.

However, essential reform cannot occur without coming to some understanding of the fundamentals of our representative democracy -- what we understand it to be and to be for and what our expectations of our representatives are and, first and foremost, what we expect of ourselves in terms of rights, freedoms and responsibilities. Establishing exactly what we aspire to and intend will, I believe, go a long way towards defining a sufficient electoral system. Personally, I hope that it is more than STV and certainly much more and very much removed from any flavour of the month MMP system. An appropriate design will be an inevitable and logical one based on our democratic principles. It will be obvious and unambiguous.

I think we might also need to investigate and accomplish a measure of democratic reform to work in concert with a decent new electoral system design. I think we need to thoughtfully consider the opinions of people like Lucien Saumer and Charles Ficner whose submissions to the OCA had significant merit.

The partisan character of the MMP-STV debate is an artifact of our basic disagreement of the nature of the democracy a new electoral system would support. That is why the discussions on this blog have been circlulating essentially the same arguments since the BC-CA got under way without getting anywhere. For the record that's 5+ years of treading water.

On June 13th Fair Vote is hosting a forum on how to proceed from this juncture. You should go.

http://www.fvcfuturedirections.eventbrite.com/

I gave a few bux to fairvote because half of it stayed in BC.  I think that organizations like fairvote end up being irrelevant to ordinary people.  They fundraise to provide enough money to have these meetings. But what is the point? It is all meaningless.

The political partys have figured out how to kill electoral reform. It is "process". The great failing of the first CA was that they did not condem the 40% superminority veto when they had moral authority. Fair vote was the same.  These jetsetters will always let us down because they are fundraising for the sake of fundraising.

"You are fair vote Canada. WHY are you letting 4 votes for fptp be equal to 6 votes for STV?" That was my question about 6 years ago. And I asked if they were taking the 60% thingy through the courts.   (I think the court challenge ran out of money eventually)  And they Halsal and the rest said that A. they did not want to annoy the politicians and B that they can beat 60%.

Both were stupid statements.  Both were horrible errors.  You must stand up for your rights or the politicians and lackeys like tielmann will piss on us.

And sure enough, it happened.  Ordinary people here are totally walked on. And we are ill served by pretend defenders of the common man and woman.

James and her advisors are not on our side.

ReeferMadness wrote:

Quote:

On June 13th Fair Vote is hosting a forum on how to proceed from this juncture. You should go.

http://www.fvcfuturedirections.eventbrite.com/ 

Well, if it weren't being held halfway across the country...

FVC should have a webcast so that those of us who can't attend could still attend.

 

[/quote]

ReeferMadness wrote:

Would you agree that we all need to get past the STV vs. MMP debate if we have any hope of getting PR in Canada?

It's past. STV is dead. It had a false life after the 2005 referendum because the ballot asked "Should British Columbia change to the BC-STV electoral system as recommended by the Citizens' Assembly on Electoral Reform?" Due to lack of a public education campaign a huge number of voters faced this ballot cold, and had to pick an answer. They voted, more often than not, for the recommended system. Duh! Such soft support melted away when faced with a well-funded No Campaign, because STV has never been successfully implemented in a jurisdiction not already familar with it since somewhere around 1930.

ReeferMadness wrote:

I think the only real advantage to MMP is that it would get more support from parties.  What do you think?

That's an over-simplification. Party hacks find open-list almost as bad as STV. Closed-list MMP gets more support from parties than open-list, which is why the parties in power in both Scotland and New Zealand didn't want to move to open-list even when public opinion in both countries favoured it. But closed-list will not fly with the public in Canada. I think the parties will have to accept open-list MMP.

ReeferMadness wrote:

What makes you believe that MMP can be more readily explained to and accepted by Canadians?  Anti PR folks could just as readily pick apart the D'hondt method as the Droop Quota.

The basic concept of MMP -- "top-up" regional MPs -- is pretty basic. Local MPs plus "top-up" regional MPs then becomes fairly intuitive, in my experience.

Only in Germany, where PR variations have been debated since 1919, do people get excited about changing from "highest average" to "highest remainder." (Yes, Germany did make that change in their MMP system a few decades ago, after great debate.) I find few people get excited about rules for rounding fractions.

Lots of people like having a local MP. Lots of people like the idea of having party members across a manageable region nominate a group of regional candidates, which is good for diversity. It's intuitively obvious that a group of members nominating five candidates will be uncomfortable nominating only one woman, or five WASPs. So, which should we do? Ahah! Let's do both. "The best of both worlds" is the MMP motto, with good reason.

ReeferMadness wrote:

Sure, MMP is conceptually straight forward. But could people easily walk through examples?

Have a look.

Wilf Day wrote:

ReeferMadness wrote:

Would you agree that we all need to get past the STV vs. MMP debate if we have any hope of getting PR in Canada?

It's past. STV is dead. It had a false life after the 2005 referendum because the ballot asked "Should British Columbia change to the BC-STV electoral system as recommended by the Citizens' Assembly on Electoral Reform?" Due to lack of a public education campaign a huge number of voters faced this ballot cold, and had to pick an answer. They voted, more often than not, for the recommended system. Duh! Such soft support melted away when faced with a well-funded No Campaign, because STV has never been successfully implemented in a jurisdiction not already familar with it since somewhere around 1930.

ReeferMadness wrote:

I think the only real advantage to MMP is that it would get more support from parties.  What do you think?

That's an over-simplification. Party hacks find open-list almost as bad as STV. Closed-list MMP gets more support from parties than open-list, which is why the parties in power in both Scotland and New Zealand didn't want to move to open-list even when public opinion in both countries favoured it. But closed-list will not fly with the public in Canada. I think the parties will have to accept open-list MMP.

ReeferMadness wrote:

What makes you believe that MMP can be more readily explained to and accepted by Canadians?  Anti PR folks could just as readily pick apart the D'hondt method as the Droop Quota.

The basic concept of MMP -- "top-up" regional MPs -- is pretty basic. Local MPs plus "top-up" regional MPs then becomes fairly intuitive, in my experience.

Only in Germany, where PR variations have been debated since 1919, do people get excited about changing from "highest average" to "highest remainder." (Yes, Germany did make that change in their MMP system a few decades ago, after great debate.) I find few people get excited about rules for rounding fractions.

Lots of people like having a local MP. Lots of people like the idea of having party members across a manageable region nominate a group of regional candidates, which is good for diversity. It's intuitively obvious that a group of members nominating five candidates will be uncomfortable nominating only one woman, or five WASPs. So, which should we do? Ahah! Let's do both. "The best of both worlds" is the MMP motto, with good reason.

If STV is dead with the result won in the last referendum, then so is MMP -- in Ontario and therefore (to take my lead from the newspapers) in the rest of the country.

I agree that, "It's intuitively obvious that a group of members nominating five candidates will be uncomfortable nominating only one woman, or five WASPs", and acknowledge that that will work across a range of diversities to yield more fair representation for everyone. In fact most parties would see that their fortunes would imporve by diversifying. That's one of the basic premises of STV. What is also intuitive is that representation overall is better if you completely do away with the SMP representation that's causing the problem in the first place. As Wilf puts it "Duh!"

Note that Wilf's new favourtite version of MMP -- MMP with regional open lists -- is pretty much a graft of STV onto a remnant of FPTP. The next small leap is realizing that voters obtain better representation locally by having a set of local representatives elected to smaller regions than MMP allows for. In other words take Wilf's "compensatory" component and abandon the rest to arrive at STV.  And there are a panoply of other benefits when you do this.

As the BC-CA learned, MMP seems attractive on first blush but on second (third, fourth, fifth...) thought, STV empowers voters and democracy much more fully.

Typical elections are such emotional herd-instinct affairs. Choosing a new electoral system should not be attempted without  ensuring thoughtful decsion making -- this presupposes an adequate education programme and fora for fullsome discussion.

I think back to the OCA where they ran a demonstration of electoral systems for picking snacks at break time. How would those "elections" have turned out if no one knew what a chocolate chip cookie tasted like, or a carrot or a muffin? What if the advocacy campaigns were unable to make convincing arguments because no one knew anything about nutrition or flavour? The results would have been meaningless. The referenda on electoral reform were just as useless.

Wilf, your motto is funny.

Here's your argument applied to a different situation. Both your legs are crushed in a car accident but you choose to get only one prosthetic because "I like having real legs". No matter that that decision is illogical -- you have no real legs anymore -- and you are going to hobble on crutches forever.

FPTP the post might have functioned adequately before the number of parties expanded beyond one. But it's "broken" and dysfunctional now. We have the technology. Democracy can be better than it was; faster, stronger... you know the drill.

ReeferMadness wrote:

Wilf Day wrote:

ReeferMadness wrote:

Sure, MMP is conceptually straight forward. But could people easily walk through examples?

Have a look.

Not quite what I had in mind.  Something that shows the math involved.  That's what the No STVers picked apart.  Especially Bill "I'm a political scientist but I can't do Grade 6 math" Tieleman.

Y'know...

If I were able to wind back the clock and do all this over again I'd go back to before the first CA and visit the academics who are responsible for this and I'd make sure they presented this system properly and then wrote about it giving it a name that really captured its features. 

Singlely transfering is just one method of aggregating a set of ordered lists into one composite list where the preferences of all the component lists are taken into account. There are a bunch of different methods but the STV method can be done in several versions by hand with very little math. 

The important thing is that all of the nice features of "STV" work regardless of the method of aggregating the votes -- some methods are just more accurate and more reliable than others -- even amongst implementations of STV.

For the purposes of the CAs and the referenda it would have been so much easier and more proper to have focused on the actual system, rather than the counting method. The message would have more clear and the benefits more easy to understand.  Notwithstanding that "STV" is a terrible acronym as Andrew Coyne (and some CA members) has pointed out on several occasions.

I think I've said most of this here on Babble before... sorry.

I know this hasn't answered your question either -- at least not directly.

Have you looked at the BC-CA site for what they say? One of the active alumni (not Ranger) could best help you with a direct answer. I'd try Craig Henschel.

If you want to see an article about aggregating lists of preferences etc. there's this:

http://lorrie.cranor.org/pubs/diss/node4.html

STV comes up about half way through under positional methods.

Actually, that illustrates my point nicely.

Where would we be if we had "Single Transferable Vote" up against "Sainte-Laguë Tabulated Vote". They'd have been named on an equal basis but the focus of either is on the wrong element.

STV was an easy target for the yes-no advocacy fight. It was named and explained for the wrong feature.

And, Reefer, you're right -- the "no" side will be able to explot these "workings under the hood" regardless.

The critics I've talked to think that not only are STV and MMP dead but that electoral reform generally is dead for the foreseeable future.

That's why we need to apply some lateral thinking or... just kick back in the backyard with a Guinness and let it all go.

Wilf, this is my point.  All voting systems are conceptually simple and they all have idiosyncracies that can be emphasized to make them look bad.  That was Dennis Pilon's main point.  No STV ignored the overall performance of STV and focused on minutiae.  Their approach was akin to opening up the back of a watch, exposing all of the components and saying "Oh my GOD - look how complicated it is", all the while ignoring whether the watch kept good time or not.

The same thing will happen to MMP if Smilin' Bill ever gets hold of it.

ReeferMadness wrote:

Wilf, this is my point.  All voting systems are conceptually simple and they all have idiosyncracies that can be emphasized to make them look bad.  That was Dennis Pilon's main point.  No STV ignored the overall performance of STV and focused on minutiae.  Their approach was akin to opening up the back of a watch, exposing all of the components and saying "Oh my GOD - look how complicated it is", all the while ignoring whether the watch kept good time or not.

The same thing will happen to MMP if Smilin' Bill ever gets hold of it.

RM:

I like the open-backed watch analogy. I'm a "pay no attention to the man behind the curtain" sort myself.

It isn't just the anti-STV side that's looking at STV askance.

The real problem is that the way STV is named, taught, presented and argued by its supporters too is back to front -- from the academics through the assembly and Fair Voters they all look at it from the wrong side -- through an open back as you put it -- at its gears --  without seriously representing how well it "keeps time" or that it does a host of other useful things that other timepieces don't and can't. Yes some of the advocates got it right but then there's Wilf...

You almost can't blame the no side for their tactics.

For the purposes of a time-constrained referendum aimed at educating the general public and arming them with the pertinent information necessary to make an informed decision, the topic of counting and stories of how votes in Germany got transfered  such that thedark horse  fifth place candidate snuck in to win the final fourth spot should have barely become a topic. It is so missing the point.

That MMP has been generally presented face side up and, therefore, seems more "intuitive" doesn't mean it actually is a better fit to the first principles of our democracy. Nor does it preclude its detractors from turning that watch ovr and opening up the back. Although, why bother when you can readily show that it doesn't keep time all that well?