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Submission COOPER-0446 (Online)

Submission By Glenn Cooper
AddressParksville, BC,
Organization
Date20040520
CategoryElectoral system change
Abstract
Many one issue parties inhibit coherent governing, so a PR component must be limited to a few seats. A party must have 8% for 1 seat, 10% for 2 etc., filled by a party's candidates with highest % of vote gained and not already elected. [2 pages]

Submission Content
  1.  To avoid the temptations for single issue groups to form parties, and to elevate their originators into the legislature, not to govern, but to heckle, use the platform there when it should be elsewhere, I suggest the bar be set reasonably high for entry into the legislature.  Eight percent of the total votes cast across the province should entitle a party to one seat in the legislative assembly, plus any seats earned by the normal first past the post constituency contests.  At 10%, the party would be entitled to 2 seats (plus) from there it would be 3% increments, for example, a party with 16 or 17% of total votes would be entitled to 4 seats, plus any earned by first past the post.  The reasons are to avoid the coalition type governments in which each minor group can hold a veto over the heads of the major governing party -- just think of the impossibility of implementing a coherent set of policies in a country such as Israel.  Italy and India are other examples where they could end up playing musical chairs. Pity those poor countries!

  2.  If a minor party does not win any by constituency majority, then the 2 or 3 seats allotted by the method in  1. above are not given to the party's governing body to assign -- oh, no!  The tallies of the votes cast for each party member in each constituency are compared on a percentage basis, with all votes cast in constituency Q being the 100% yardstick for the party candidate there. Whichever party candidate garnered the highest proportion in his/her constituency would be the first one "in" and the next highest would be the
next one "in ", and so on until the number (2,3 or 4 etc.) had been elected from those constituencies where either the candidate or the party was particularly popular or strong.

  3.  In this way a constituency (let's call it Q) could have 2 representatives in the house, the one elected by majority and the 'leading' minor party candidate by the party with strength in Q. Sometimes they would be in concert and other times not.  That's no problem, that's democracy at the grass roots. 

  4.  Beware of allowing too many parties to form and be represented in the legislature. There should be not only the 8% entry bar given in 1. above, but there should be a registration procedure requiring a petition of a very high number of qualified voters, taken within a 6 month period, plus a serious registration deposit of say 2 million dollars which would be forfeited if no seat is won in the next following election. There are always the dangers of too many unrelated options confusing the less sophisticated voters. I was in Czechoslovakia during their first free election, and there were 22 parties clamouring for support. Happily they were lucky, many of the leaders were quite unfamiliar except in their own small bailiwick. They chose Vaclav Havel, a playwright who had been a voice of impudent but serious lampooning of the communist regime. The country has gone on from success to more of the same -- now only 3 or 4 parties.

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