Comments on: Wherefore, electoral reform in Canada?

Wherefore, electoral reform in Canada?

elkevelvet — Tue, 22 Feb 2022 10:57:01 -0800

The Alternative Vote: A solution to the democratic deficit? This November 2021 presentation from Fair Vote Canada provides, in my opinion, a comprehensive treatment of the serious short-comings to non-proportional (winner-take-all) ranked ballot systems. Will the Ontario decision distract us from real reform? As Canada comes to terms with convoy blockades and the Ottawa Occupation, we need to look past the Emergency Act and determine whether changing how we elect our (provincial and national) governments can point to long-term solutions to long-simmering regional frictions and electoral distortions (and believe me, any Albertan can tell you all about distortions).

By: justsomebodythatyouusedtoknow

justsomebodythatyouusedtoknow — Tue, 22 Feb 2022 11:37:24 -0800

For me, the main value of the video is its argument that Alternative Vote (AV) / Ranked Ballot is even less democratic than First-Past-the-Post (FPTP), which came to me as a surprise. I had thought that AV would help the minor parties get seats more proportionately to their popular support but that seems not to be the case. Proportional Representation (PR) seems to have some difficulty gaining popular support in Canada. In a 2018 referendum in BC first-past-the-post defeated proportional representation, with a supermajority of 61% supporting FPTP. It's worth asking why proportional representation lost in the referendum, especially given that PR had strong support in pre-election voting. Perceived complexity seems to have been a factor.

By: figurant

figurant — Tue, 22 Feb 2022 12:09:55 -0800

In a 2018 referendum in BC first-past-the-post defeated proportional representation Sadly, the referendum was following FPTP rules. Otherwise, BC provincial elections could be determined by following a formula of 61% FPTP and 39% PR.

By: Popular Ethics

Popular Ethics — Tue, 22 Feb 2022 12:34:46 -0800

I had thought that AV would help the minor parties get seats more proportionately to their popular support but that seems not to be the case. Why is supporting minor parties the be-all goal of voter reform? It seems to me ranked ballots help drive consensus, and that's far better than a bunch of People's Party yahoos holding the balance of power.

By: clawsoon

clawsoon — Tue, 22 Feb 2022 12:41:39 -0800

It seems to me ranked ballots help drive consensus My impression is that the Reform Party and then the CPC have been using ranked ballots in their leadership races longer than any other major party. You could argue that it papered over lack of consensus rather than driving consensus in the last couple of CPC leadership races.

By: philip-random

philip-random — Tue, 22 Feb 2022 12:47:10 -0800

proportional representation is bloody complicated and doesn't really have anything in common with Canada's traditional parliamentary first-past-the-post system. To do it right would be to change an awful lot. And good luck actually explaining the process to somebody who's got other things on their mind. Yes, it's as simple as the party that gets 17 percent of the vote getting 17 percent of the seats in parliament. But who actually chooses the people who get to sit in those seats? The party? So much for voters getting to choose the individuals they want to have representing them. Yes, that's just one possible version of how proportional representation might work, but it's also probably the simplest. Another angle might be that the party is obliged to reward the 17 individuals who got the most the votes in their relevant ridings. Except Canadian ridings vary hugely in size (whether you're measuring geography or actual voters), so how does a party candidate from Nunvavut have a chance against one from downtown Toronto? Like, I said, it's complicated. Which leads back to ranked ballot/alternative vote, which is definitely less complicated. Basically, you don't just vote for one candidate, but rather you rank them. Joe's my first vote, Kathy's my second, Elrond is my third ... and so on. If nobody gets a fifty-percent-plus-one majority on the first count, the last place candidate gets removed and everybody that ranked them #1, their votes then go to their #2 option. If there's still nobody with a clear majority, you remove the new loser ... and so on. Until you have a winner. The big problem here is the election will pretty much always be won by the least offensive candidate. Which doesn't sound that bad, except in Canada, smarter political minds than mine have crunched the numbers and concluded that the Liberals would probably always win. Because they're the middle ground party. In fact, I'm pretty sure Trudeau's on the record somewhere as saying that's why the Liberals reneged on the electoral reform option a few years back. Because they knew the reform that they were in favour of would be rejected by their two main competitors (the Conservatives and the NDP). A lot of money would be spent, a lot of energy would be exhausted and nothing would be accomplished. So we remain stuck with First Past The Post (aka whoever gets most the votes wins; doesn't matter if they only got twenty-five percent of them, as long as they got more than anybody else). Doesn't sound fair and it isn't. But maybe we need to get it out of our heads that electoral politics can't ever really be that fair. Even if you could institute the perfect proportional system in all of its complexity and nuance, you'd still have rabid political animals working the system, exploiting weaknesses, furthering their own interests, making damned sure it would only be fair for their side. Maybe we need to get it out of our heads that there's a political solution to the political mess we're in.

By: clawsoon

clawsoon — Tue, 22 Feb 2022 13:13:22 -0800

figurant: Sadly, the referendum was following FPTP rules. Otherwise, BC provincial elections could be determined by following a formula of 61% FPTP and 39% PR. Once members get into the legislature, we get FPTP laws. Perhaps true proportionality requires laws to be passed in proportion to the number of members in the legislature. What FPTP does is (imperfectly) convert preferences into decisions. A few extra votes in the right places gives us majority governments, which gives us a clear set of laws passed and leadership decisions to vote for or against in the next election. Is that better or worse for governance and/or democratic survival than minority governments? I don't know. Perhaps they address it later in the video, which I'm only about a quarter of the way through so far. Back to it...

By: mbo

mbo — Tue, 22 Feb 2022 13:21:34 -0800

I live in NZ, we went thru this 25 years ago - I think that we mostly picked the better solution (MMP - the same as Germany). We still use FPP for electing local representatives, it's arguably still wrong to do that I think there's a general rule of thumb: MMP best for when you are choosing parties (parties for parliament), STV best when you are choosing people (Mayors, councilors, electorate MPs)

By: nangua

nangua — Tue, 22 Feb 2022 13:29:59 -0800

We use a modified D'Hondt method in Scotland which is a mix of first past the post with a proportional vote top-up. It's not that complicated. You vote once for a constituency MSP and once for a party to represent your region. The constituency vote is FPTP and in my area it's usually the local Conservative aristocrat who gets elected, but because I'm part of a region that includes a city I also have the opportunity to vote Green and have the hope of getting a rep for our region (which we did last time!). It's probably a good compromise system for which gives people attached to FPTP something to hang onto, while actually resulting in a government that more or less reflects the political attitudes of the country.

By: ssg

ssg — Tue, 22 Feb 2022 13:32:03 -0800

But maybe we need to get it out of our heads that electoral politics can't ever really be that fair. Except many other countries have made the transition to more representative systems. Among our peers, it's really only Canada, the US and most of the UK who haven't. How we get from here to there, I don't really know after the referendum failures in BC and Trudeau breaking his promise, but of course things can be better — we only have to look outside our borders to see that.

By: clawsoon

clawsoon — Tue, 22 Feb 2022 13:34:37 -0800

(I'm also curious about how confidence votes work in other systems. Right now we've got a situation where a bunch of NDP members and a few Liberal members would probably be voting against invocation of the Emergencies Act, but since the government made it a confidence vote and they don't want to be blamed for causing an unnecessary election, they fall in line.)

By: elkevelvet

elkevelvet — Tue, 22 Feb 2022 13:36:03 -0800

any argument that seems to be based on "it's too hard/complicated" and/or variations of "it won't change anything/is it really worth the effort" are not the most compelling, in my view. if it's hard to imagine we can see positive change in our elected governments by changing how we elect representatives, surely it's harder to imagine that a system that may have passed scrutiny over 150 years ago is the best we can hope for?

By: WaterAndPixels

WaterAndPixels — Tue, 22 Feb 2022 13:44:24 -0800

But who actually chooses the people who get to sit in those seats? The party? So much for voters getting to choose the individuals they want to have representing them I'd respectfully call bullshit on this, it's the very rare exception when electors will vote for the representative VS voting for his party. But it does happen sometimes, so let's ride with it. You could go with some kind of dynamic system with lets say a 100 ridings, in which you vote for a representative/party to keep the idea of voting of a an independent a possibility. This representative is guaranteed to be seated. Then x MPs are added to each party with > n% of the vote (to cull out marginal parties) to make the number of MPs match the percentage of the vote they got. Additional MPs would need to have been on a ballot, and are picked in order of which one was closest to winning his riding. This X is variable and is chosen as the smallest number that'll balance out the results to a certain precision. For example, in the last Qc provincial election that would mean 125 MPs being expanded to 200 MPs. (it has too many ridings to begin with). CAQ with 37.4% goes from 74 MPs to 75 PLQ with 24.8% goes from 31 MPs to 50 PQ with 17.06% goes from 10 MPs to 34 QS with 16.1% goes from 10 MPs to 32 With a system like this it would be pretty hard to form anything else than a minority government, but since your chances of going > 50% are very slim you'd expect we wouldn't be in a perpetual election and the most represented party would have to build a coalition. We'd probably need updated rules about how we proceed with this.

By: kaibutsu

kaibutsu — Tue, 22 Feb 2022 13:52:26 -0800

But who actually chooses the people who get to sit in those seats? The party? So much for voters getting to choose the individuals they want to have representing them. That's a feature, not a bug. Choose the /party/ whose ideas best represent what you want for the country. If they screw up picking individuals for the seats, you pick a different party next time. Which is easy to do, because unlike FPTP, there aren't mathematical obstacles to having more than two parties. Meanwhile, the petty biases of the electorate are suppressed. For example, countries which pick parties instead of individuals have done much better at electing proportionally-sane numbers of women.

By: Jpfed

Jpfed — Tue, 22 Feb 2022 14:09:36 -0800

I hope no one minds if I let a small cat out of a bag, but I had thought that AV would help the minor parties get seats more proportionately to their popular support but that seems not to be the case. There isn't really a mechanism to make this happen. To the extent that IRV is better than FPTP, it's because it funnels the ballots of third-party voters into their Duverger-approved closest major-party. I don't argue for IRV (or other FPTP alternatives like Approval) because they will someday help a Ross Perot or Ralph Nader win. I argue for them because people that voted for Nader or Perot should still get to have *some* input as to which of the two major parties will end up in charge, and most non-FPTP methods allow those people's ballots to be not-wasted in that respect. There might be IRV or other method advocates that believe they're helping third parties or something. Maybe even most of them do! I wouldn't rule that out. But my desire for alternative methods has never been grounded in getting third parties to viability- just making sure that as few non-strategic votes get wasted in the face of what social choice theorists call (perhaps heartlessly, but still) irrelevant alternatives. Mere methods of casting or tabulating ballots for single seats do not have much influence over the number of viable parties. Reaching this realization is why I no longer consider approval voting to be significantly superior to IRV. The differences between them are pretty small in terms of getting ballots to not be wasted. To get more viable parties, you need to have more seats open per district/election. That is by far the more consequential reform. Lee Drutman has written a fair amount about the impact of seats-per-election, proportionality, etc. and is the Twitter follow I'd recommend for people interested in this topic generally.

By: clawsoon

clawsoon — Tue, 22 Feb 2022 14:29:16 -0800

Ah... 1:09:44 into the video they explain why they don't use "ranked ballot" to talk about the system they don't like: Because proportional systems can use a ranked ballot, too.

By: elkevelvet

elkevelvet — Tue, 22 Feb 2022 14:33:37 -0800

^ THIS guy rtfa

By: fortitude25

fortitude25 — Tue, 22 Feb 2022 14:41:33 -0800

Is proportional representation of some sort fairer and more equitable than first past the post? Absolutely. Is there a high probability this system will be adopted at some point in the near future in Canada? Unlikely. We can't even get the entire populace vaccinated against a serious disease without protests paralyzing the capital for nearly a month. I also never fail to bring up probably the most cynical broken promise of the Trudeau government, their promise to abandon FPTP after the 2015 election gave them a majority. Trudeau asked Maryam Monsef, a young, dynamic woman of color, to be the Minister for Democratic Reform and made her the public face of this promise. An all-party committee was struck, it recommended that FPTP be abandoned in favor of a proportional representation model and that a referendum be held to give it legitimacy. Then Justin knifes his own minister in the back, hilariously claiming that the only reason people wanted electoral reform was because Stephen Harper was the PM, and now that he, Justin Trudeau, was prime minister, there was really no need for reform! Under Mr. Harper, there were so many people unhappy with the government and its approach that they were saying, 'We need electoral reform in order to no longer have a government we don't like,'" Trudeau explained in French at an event. "However, under the current system, they now have a government they are more satisfied with. And the motivation to want to change the electoral system is less compelling." Way to support your minister, Justin. Anyway, they backed off the promise, Monsef was shuffled out of the portfolio (and eventually lost her seat in the 2021 election), and the Liberals were reduced to a minority in the 2019 and 2021 elections.* I think any chance to reform FPTP federally is dead for a generation. *For the Americans here who never failed to bring up Trump losing the popular vote to Hillary in 2016, the Liberals under Justin Trudeau have lost the popular vote to the Conservatives in two straight elections, yet still formed the government - yet another reason why our electoral system deserves a fresh look!

By: philip-random

philip-random — Tue, 22 Feb 2022 14:42:57 -0800

^ THIS guy rtfa and the lead frame from the vid says "ranked ballot" directly underneath "Alternative Vote" For the record, given the choice, I'd go for Alternative Vote (ranked ballot) because I think it's the simplest alternative to FPTP. Here in British Columbia, I watched the campaign for Proportional Representation get easily undermined by opponents who played the complicated/confusing card with a vengeance. As a friend put it at the time, "If you can't explain it to reasonably smart twelve year old in less than five minutes, it ain't gonna happen." So yeah, by all means, let's try AV ... except as I noted above, it plays to the Liberals and the Conservatives and the NDP know it. So good luck getting them on board unless there's a major shift in the national political climate. Which who knows? it might happen in the wake of the past month's noise.

By: clawsoon

clawsoon — Tue, 22 Feb 2022 14:44:14 -0800

^ THIS guy rtfa I did make three comments before I got to that point, so you can't pin that "he read the article first" slur on me, lol... :-D A few extra votes in the right places gives us majority governments, which gives us a clear set of laws passed and leadership decisions to vote for or against in the next election. Half-baked theory time: FPTP produces more majority governments. Majority government are more decisive. In that way, they're like the provision of the Roman Republic for limited-term dictators in time of war. In war, a good decision made quickly is usually much better than a perfect decision made slowly. The USA and the UK have been at war a lot over the past couple of centuries, and they're the two major proponents of FPTP, and those two facts are connected.

By: clawsoon

clawsoon — Tue, 22 Feb 2022 15:01:27 -0800

fortitude25: Is there a high probability this system will be adopted at some point in the near future in Canada? Unlikely. Around 1:23:00 of the video they start talking about a citizen's assembly that's apparently happening right now in PEI. (Correction: happening last fall, when the video came out... I'm having trouble finding much follow-up information about it, though.)

By: MattD

MattD — Tue, 22 Feb 2022 15:05:01 -0800

The US is not monolithically FTTP. RCV systems are used in Maine and many large cities including New York and San Francisco. Variants on jungle primary and runoffs systems enable third parties to contend without being spoilers in a number of states, including California.

By: clawsoon

clawsoon — Tue, 22 Feb 2022 15:09:14 -0800

This article has a pair of polls (2016 and 2019) on support for proportional representation in Canada. The most notable thing about it to me is the massive swing in Conservative support between the two dates. It'd be interesting to see how the idea is faring in 2022.

By: clawsoon

clawsoon — Tue, 22 Feb 2022 15:25:40 -0800

At the end of the FPP video, they refer to this video in which they argue that a referendum is what politicians do when they want the answer to be "no"... and that's why they support citizens' assemblies rather than referendums for electoral reform.

By: WaterAndPixels

WaterAndPixels — Tue, 22 Feb 2022 15:49:41 -0800

Citizen assemblies seem good to build up support, but where do we go from there? Referendum? To me it's something that would need to pass either by referendum or by near unanimous conscient of parliament.

By: CCBC

CCBC — Tue, 22 Feb 2022 15:51:07 -0800

clawsoon: In 2016, BC-STV was being promoted as a way to destroy political party power. The Fraser Institute was really big on this notion and former politician turned bureaucrat, Gordon Gibson, was a major promoter. But after people really looked at other countries (Ireland, Tasmania, Malta) they could see that wasn't true, and the Right lost interest. The other big difficulty was how to cut up the province into reasonably sized constituencies. This is already a problem. (Yes, the legislature needs more seats.) What AV offered was an end to the idea of the "wasted vote".

By: clawsoon

clawsoon — Tue, 22 Feb 2022 16:03:54 -0800

CCBC, they talk about the BC referendum in the referendum video, and I was surprised by the extremes that the "no" side went to in its advertising. Showing soldiers marching through the streets while talking about extremists taking over, telling the Chinese-speaking community that they might have to flee their homes, etc. I'm not very familiar with the BC referendum, but I definitely didn't expect that.

By: Lanark

Lanark — Tue, 22 Feb 2022 16:30:08 -0800

But who actually chooses the people who get to sit in those seats? The party? So much for voters getting to choose the individuals they want to have representing them. The party select who gets to run for them in the first place, so I don't see that's really any different to FPTP.

By: quizzical

quizzical — Tue, 22 Feb 2022 17:17:11 -0800

My impression is that the Reform Party and then the CPC have been using ranked ballots in their leadership races longer than any other major party. You could argue that it papered over lack of consensus rather than driving consensus in the last couple of CPC leadership races. I think the more likely culprit there is the weighting of ballots across ridings. One of the more interesting proposals on the BC referendum was Dual-member proportional representation, which avoids a lot of the issues with party lists by tending towards electing candidates who don't win outright, but otherwise perform well, and also provides a way for independents to win the proportional seats.

By: anthill

anthill — Thu, 24 Feb 2022 18:23:06 -0800

I was persuaded by Stéphane Dion (one of the few who was, I guess) and his "P-3" model. Proportional, Preferential, Personalized - or "that dope-ass one". Basically a Swedish proportional system within 3..5 MP super-riding levels. Parties would need to get >17% of the vote in a super-riding to elect one of the MPs. Citizens would be represented by more than one MP (so if you don't get help from one, you can go to another). I think it sounds a pretty good compromise between regional and proportional. Rural regions would find their super-ridings getting pretty big, though.