[To view the submission in its original format, see the linked
document below]
Let the People Decide: The Case for a Voter-Centred
Electoral System for BC
Introduction
I have observed the assembly's six weekend learning sessions so
far, and I've been very impressed with the work the members have
done. Please let me throw in my two bits...
When we talk about an electoral system for BC, we are talking
about the way we choose who will represent us in the legislature
from a pool of candidates. Since there are 4 million
people in BC, and only 79 MLAs, each MLA acts as a voice for around
50,000 British Columbians. The work of the Citizens'
Assembly is to come up with an electoral system that at each
election can best answer two questions: Which
of the candidates will become MLAs, and which 50,000 will each of
them represent?
Local Representation
Our current single-member plurality system tackles these
questions by simply chopping up the province into ridings of about
50,000 residents and assigns them the candidate with the most votes
in that riding as their representative. This is an
attempt to represent groups purely by geographical area, and it
isn't working as well as we'd like, even at doing what it was
seemingly designed to do, representing local concerns.
We need a system that not only gives more effective local
representation, but that allows for other types of representation
as well.
Proportional Representation
One particularly desirable way of grouping voters under
representatives, as long as political parties are important in our
system, would be by political party. This is what
proportional representation means, representation of groups by
political party preference. A proportional system in BC
would assign each party one MLA for each 50,000 votes it receives
(if everyone voted – less in reality).
Notice that the vote is for the party, and not for the
person. This is even true for open-list PR systems like
the Finnish system, where voters can indicate which candidate
within the party they prefer. The vote counts first for
the party to determine how many seats it wins, and then for your
favourite candidate within the party to see if she wins one of the
party's seats. Your vote is used to elect more popular
candidates from the party before it is used to elect the one you
voted for. It is not possible to indicate
support for only one candidate without implicitly supporting every
candidate within the party.
The Tradeoff
Not every person within a 50,000-person single-member riding
will support the same party, and so you can't have proportional
representation without increasing the size of ridings.
The larger the riding, the more proportional the seat assignments
can be, and the more smaller parties can win seats.
But, as the district magnitude increases, it becomes likely that
some areas within the district that had their own single-member
riding will not be home to any representatives.
This is true even under open lists, since party support could
easily be evenly distributed throughout a large district, in which
case the votes in more densely-populated areas would decide who
gets elected from each party. With the outlying area
not having enough of any single party's supporters to elect a
candidate, no party need pay them any attention, and they will be
powerless to elect one of their own, despite having 50,000
residents.
The Balance
Mixed Member Proportional [MMP] systems, as in
Germany, try to achieve a balance by having two tiers of
representatives, one elected by local area and one by party-list,
to give overall proportional results. By having two
votes, one for a local candidate and one for a party, every voter
can claim both a local representative and possibly a whole list of
party representatives, depending on how many seats their party
received. The voter's voice is split between the local
and the party representatives, with only some of the
representatives owing their seat to their local voters, and the
rest owing their seat to their party and its voters.
This split is imposed by the electoral system by the ratio of local
seats to party seats.
Voters who supported a popular party will find that their party
representatives will mostly also be local representatives in other
districts, but could possibly have a local representative from
their own party. Voters who supported smaller parties
will find that their local representative is from a large party,
but that their party representatives do not belong to a district at
all. This may not be ideal under all circumstances, but
would certainly be much better for BC than the system we have.
MMP can also be done by giving the voter only one vote, for a
local candidate, and then interpreting that vote as an endorsement
of that candidate's entire party. However, this doesn't
allow voters to support a party different from that of the
candidate they support.
There is even a method used in some parts of Germany and being
considered for Quebec that builds party lists from a party's
defeated local candidates, with the most popular at the top, after
the voting is completed. This might work as a limited
open list for MMP, where your vote could help your local candidate
be elected in her party's list if she didn't win the local riding
outright, and you could still cast a separate vote for the party of
your choice.
Other Kinds of Representation
The assembly has talked a lot about local representation, which
means representation of groups by geographical area, and
proportional representation, which means representation of groups
by political party preference. But there are many more
types of representation that could be considered for an electoral
system, such as representation by gender, culture, ethnicity,
profession, income level, age, religion, a specific political
issue, or representation by any other criteria
imaginable. Many of these overlap, and all interact
with the others by a complicated set of tradeoffs, just like the
tradeoff between local and proportional representation.
Voter Empowerment
The most important value when considering an electoral system
isn't the type of representation it will provide. It is
voter empowerment. Will the system work to
empower all the voters of the province to have a real say in their
own affairs? Proportionality and local
representation may help this goal, but they must be implemented for
the voter's sake, not for their own sake. For example,
local representation is strong in theory under the current system,
but in practice it does not work to empower voters because of
excessive party discipline and "safe seats." As a
result, representatives speak more for their parties than for their
constituents. Voters must be offered meaningful
choice.
Inevitably, there will be tradeoffs between any kind of
representation voters may wish to have. What you need
to do for the citizens of BC is not to make these tradeoffs for
them, but to give them a system that allows them to decide for
themselves at each election what kind of representation they want,
and what tradeoffs they are willing to make to get it.
Voting for the Party or for the Person?
Voter empowerment dictates that voters be allowed to decide for
themselves to what degree they will cast their vote based on the
party or the person. Forcing them to do both, as in
Mixed-Member Proportional, is a compromise solution.
Under MMP the party vote is what determines the overall composition
of the legislature – the local vote just works to
spread some of the representatives around more evenly on a
geographical basis.
As mentioned before, even open-list proportional systems still
interpret votes as being first and foremost for the
party. The problem is that when the voter is limited to
simply marking an X beside only one candidate, it is impossible to
interpret whether that vote is in support of the entire party, or
just in support of the one candidate as a person. One
of the problems with the BC political culture currently is that
votes are being largely interpreted as party votes, with the
individual MLAs and the concerns of their constituents being
relegated to background roles.
The inability of voters to communicate at election time
a distaste for tight party discipline means that there is very
little to check the growing power of political parties under our
system. Forcing voters to vote for a party
under a proportional system might allow for smaller parties to gain
some seats, but it would only further entrench power in the hands
of parties.
An open party list might alleviate this a little, but would
still not give voters a very sophisticated choice. Perhaps a voter
might support some candidates in a party, but not
others. Perhaps she also supports candidates in other
parties, and maybe would even like to see an independent member
elected. A party vote would not help her to express any
of these preferences.
Preferential Ballots
Preferential ballots can be a tool of great voter
empowerment. Even the nonproportional Alternative Vote
system empowers voters more than our simple first-past-the-post
system by introducing a more subtle mechanism for determining the
most popular candidate in each riding to stop
vote-splitting. Do not ask why we should have a
preferential ballot; ask instead why we should not have
one. Why should any voter ever have to abandon his
preferred candidate just because he suspects that she may not get
elected, or abandon his preferred party because that party might
not make the threshold required to win any seats? Why
should voters not be empowered to indicate as many preferences as
they have?
There may be good reasons why we cannot empower voters in this
way. Perhaps the voting process will become too
complicated. Perhaps we will have to compromise
proportionality or local representation in such a way that takes
away more power from the voters than it gives. Judge
this for yourselves.
The Single Transferable Vote
If you've read between the lines, you've already guessed where
this is going. STV is a system designed to empower the
voters to decide, at every election, their own criteria for which
candidates will earn a seat, and which 50,000 British Columbians
each will represent. The STV formula for counting
preferential ballots dynamically sorts voters into groups around
each candidate in a way that satisfies as much as possible each
voter's criteria for the kind of representation he or she
wants.
Thomas Hare, the inventor of STV, is said to have explained it
something like this: Suppose you had to elect several
representatives for a large school class. You could
have all the candidates line up at the front and ask every student
to stand next to their preferred candidate. Soon all
the students would be standing next to someone. A
candidate with many supporters would realize that she has more than
she needs to guarantee election, and send some of her extra
supporters to stand beside their next favourite
candidate. And the candidate with the fewest supporters
would realize that he couldn't win, and bow out by letting his
supporters go stand beside another candidate if they
wished. After a bit of shuffling like this, only the
required number of candidates would be left, and each would have
about an equal number of supporters. Many supporters
would be standing next to a candidate that was not their first
choice, but they only would have moved on after either seeing that
their preferred candidate already had enough votes, or accepting
that their preferred candidate did not have enough support to be
elected, and if they had a preference among the remaining
candidates.
STV and Voter Empowerment
An example serves to show how STV empowers voters. I
mentioned above how the large ridings in a proportional system
could leave large areas inside ridings without a local
representative, with the voters in those areas unable to remedy the
situation. Under STV, this could happen as well,
but only if the voters allowed it to
happen. For example, by voting strictly along
party lines, voters can make STV behave just like a regional open
list system (albeit with a much more sophisticated say in the
ordering of candidates within each party), and risk missing out on
local representation for the sake of proportional party
representation. On the other hand, STV offers voters a
simple remedy for a perceived lack of local representation by
allowing them to cross party lines and rank local candidates above
all others, regardless of party. STV guarantees that
any geographical area that has at least 50,000 people (in the case
of BC) within the same electoral district, wants a local
representative, and votes accordingly, will get one, no matter how
large the district is.
This voter behaviour has been observed in Ireland.
Many voters cross party lines to rank local candidates highly, and
every district elects members from the different communities within
that district.
Now here's the punchline: The electoral powers
available to a geographical group under STV are available to any
large enough group of people, whether they define themselves along
party lines, gender lines, cultural, ethnic, or religious lines, by
income level, age, profession, or in any other manner
whatsoever. If any group of voters within a district
can meet the quota (for example, in an 8-member district,
one-ninth, or 11%, of the total district vote), then STV empowers
them to elect a candidate to represent them. In
addition, if any large enough group is seen to be lacking
representation, candidates wanting to represent their interests
will almost certainly seek them out and present themselves at the
next election.
These groups do not have to be organized groups –
they do not even have to be aware that they are a
group. STV does all the work. If enough
farmers prefer a farming candidate, if enough youth prefer someone
young, if enough women (or men!) want a female representative, then
it will be done.
Local Representation under STV
Since STV is designed to respond to the concerns of voters, the
quality of local representation under STV is decided by how voters
themselves choose to weigh local issues against other concerns such
as provincial issues or ideological partisan issues. If
inadequate information and an excessively complex ballot were no
obstacles, I would say why not have one gigantic province-wide open
list to elect MLAs by STV? Then no area would be forced
to choose a local candidate, but every area would be free to do so
if they wanted.
This is important to understand. You could assign
single-member districts in the North, to be elected by Alternative
Vote (which is what STV boils down to when only one person is to be
elected), but doing so would force Northern voters to select a
"very local" candidate, as they do under the current
system. Putting them in a larger, spread-out
multi-member district gives those voters the same choice a Southern
urban voter has to prefer either neighbourhood candidates or
ideological candidates (or any other kind of candidates), and gives
all minorities a chance at proportional representation, not just
geographical minorities. You might argue that Northern
voters would always select more localized candidates, and you might
be right. But why force them to do so? STV
empowers voters in such a way that large, spread-out districts need
not fear losing out on their current level of local representation
if that is what they want.
In fact, multi-member ridings are crucial for improving the
quality of local representation in the district, because having
several candidates running for each party allows voters to pick and
choose which one they like without having to hold their noses and
vote for another party. As it is, voters are often
stuck with party-line incumbents due to a lack of
options. And as we all know, the party line does not
often lead to effective local representation.
To sum up, large districts under STV cannot harm voters'
ability to choose effective local
representation.
Proportionality under STV
As I mentioned, if inadequate information and an excessively
complex ballot were no obstacles, then I would suggest one giant
province-wide district to elect members using STV, since this does
not bar small outlying areas from choosing local
representation. Unfortunately, though, we are limited
in the number of candidates we can reasonably expect voters to know
anything about, and so a ballot with 300 candidates is out of the
question. However, the larger we can make the districts
within the limitations of ballot complexity, the more proportional
the results will be. I would think that a ballot to
elect somewhere between 5 and 10 members in a single district would
be small enough to avoid alienating or confusing voters and still
provide adequate proportionality.
While 10 may seem a little high at first, remember that this
doesn't mean the voter has to rank 10 candidates.
Ranking as many as she knows about will almost certainly allow her
ballot to come to rest on a relatively popular candidate.
The Droop Quota provides a built-in threshold. A
5-member district would exclude candidates and parties who couldn't
get one-sixth (16.7%) of the vote after transfers. A
6-member district would exclude those that couldn't get one-seventh
(14.3%) , and an 7-member district would exclude those that
couldn't get one-eighth (12.5%), and so on. It is
important to note that these thresholds apply to votes received
after transfers from eliminated candidates. A candidate
might receive only 4% of first preferences, but could easily end up
with 13% of the vote after transfers.
STV is technically not as proportional as other PR systems, such
as MMP, that use longer, closed lists. However, I urge
you not to get caught up in putting mathematical proportionality
ahead of real-world voter empowering choice. What good
is it to me if my party gets the exact number of seats it deserves,
but all their representatives are beholden to the party elite who
dominate the system? STV doesn't get caught up with
making sure parties are treated fairly -- the
proportionality that comes from STV counting derives from the
desire to see that all voters are treated
fairly. STV is more concerned with "personal
representation" than "proportional representation":
Every voter should be able to somehow direct their vote towards
their most suitable representative, given a limited number of
members to be elected.
Party Discipline and Independents
To my eyes, STV would do the most of any electoral system in
allowing local constituents' concerns to trump the party line when
there is a conflict between the two. As mentioned
above, STV's multi-member districts give voters a choice of which
of their party's candidates will best represent their
interests. This allows candidates more freedom in
developing their own platform, and in treating their party as
simply a group of people that they will cooperate with in the
legislature. Candidates might feel empowered to focus
more on what they stand for rather than who they stand
with. As such, STV allows the greatest chance for the
election of independents, if that is what voters
want.
A Mixed-Member System Revisited
One of the major problems with a two-tier system like MMP in BC
is that the number of local representatives would have to be
reduced to have enough second-tier MLAs to ensure proportional
results. This is because, in the case of MMP, the
lower-tier is based on single-member districts, which gives very
disproportional results, and so we need lots of top-up party-list
members to achieve proportionality.
If the assembly decides that it wants a greater measure of
proportional represetation by party than a single-tier system of
regional multi-member districts can provide, I would suggest adding
a provincial top-up tier. In this case, since the first
tier is already quite proportional, the second tier would only
require a small number of members, perhaps 10, leaving 69 members
at the local level. Of course, I would argue that the
first tier should be elected by STV. The second tier
however, since it is used to give proportional results by party,
would have to use some other system, likely a party
list.
Unfortunately, it would be difficult to make this an open list
without prohibiting candidates from running at both levels,
otherwise the list would have to be very long to allow for
replacements for candidates that got elected locally and had to be
removed from the party list. One way the party lists
could be formed in a relatively open fashion is from unsuccessful
candidates at the local level, ordered by how many first-place
votes each received in their riding. This would still
require either a second, party vote, or interpreting each voter's
first preference as indicating his party preference.
How to Explain STV Voting
While the counting process may be somewhat complicated, the
voting process is simple to understand. A voter need
simply know that they must rank as many candidates as they can, and
that their ballot can only ever be used to help a more-preferred
candidate defeat a less-preferred or unranked candidate, and never
the other way around.
Ballot Form
Political parties would like the candidates to be grouped by
party to simplify party voting. But in BC, voters might
prefer to have candidates grouped by city or town to facilitate
local voting in large multi-member districts. The
assembly could recommend that candidates be grouped both by party,
horizontally, and by community, vertically, so that voters could
navigate a large ballot with the greatest ease. I feel
the ballot form could be very important in selling a powerful
system like STV to the voting public.
Importance of Randomizing Preferential
Ballots
Since voters may want to rank all the candidates from one party
or one area, but not really have much preference between them, it
is important to have the candidates listed in different orders on
different ballots, to negate the effect of the "donkey vote", i.e.,
ranking the candidates of one party from top to bottom.
It may also be a good idea to list the parties and communities in
different orders as well, to avoid favouring one party or community
with our unconscious preferences for beginning at the top
left.
Lesson from the Australian Senate
Do not require voters to rank all candidates, and thereby tempt
governments to give voters the option of "above-the-line" voting to
make the exercise easier (and "coincidentally" empower parties over
voters).
Avoiding Future Government Tampering
Future governments may decide to tamper with the system that you
recommend. They may decide to "improve" local
representation by reducing the district magnitudes from 5-10 to
2-3, which would kill most of the proportionality offered by STV
and revert us back to essentially a two-party system.
One way to avoid this would be to explicitly require that districts
have a magnitude of at least five. Another way, if you
decided (against my advice) to have smaller districts in the North,
would be to require a local referendum to shrink the magnitude of
any district.
I trust that some of the more paranoid assembly members will be
able to foresee many other ways that governments might want to
rework the new system subtly to their advantage, and will include
language in your recommendation to prevent such actions.
A Word on "None of the Above"
The NOTA option might be a little beyond your mandate, but I
think it would be a nice idea to add an independent candidate named
"None of the Above" to every ballot. If NOTA happened
to win a seat, it could be filled by the same process used to
select the Citizens' Assembly. Really give the voters
the power to choose a system free of political parties.
Chances are they'll never use it, but politicians might lose a
little sleep knowing it's there. Put it in your
recommendation. Why not?
Conclusion
STV is a system that doesn't dictate to voters the terms of
their representation, whether it will be local or by
party. Instead, it lets the voters dictate what the
terms of their representation will be. STV is the best
system for BC.
Thank you for reading my submission. I hope it helps
you in your deliberations. I'm happy to clarify any
points. Contact Ryan Fugger
<rafspam@yahoo.ca>. Please remember that almost
any system is better than the one we have, and not to let the
details get in the way of this big picture. Whatever
decision you collectively make will be the right one.
Thank you for your hard work on behalf of all British
Columbians.
More STV Information:
http://www.ark.ac.uk/elections/gstv.htm
(many good links)
levelCMS