To British Columbia and your Citizens' Assembly.
I put up two linked web pages on British Columbia Chooses a Voting
System [the link to the second web page is at the end of the first
web page]. This is my contribution, complete with color
paintings from pioneer Canada, to associate with each of the main
types of electoral system! I hope it is amusing as well as helpful
in a non-technical way. The web address is:
http://www.voting.ukscientists.com/bcvot.html
I didn't know the Citizens' Assembly would allow submissions from
foreigners. I have followed electoral reform in Britain since it
became a national issue after the two 1974 elections, that were
widely regarded as unfair to the third party. I had learned about
the issue as a social science student. So, I knew there was more to
curing the irrationality of a winner-takes-all system than sharing
out seats between parties in proportion to votes for their
candidates. Most of the UK official reports are reviewed
on my web site. The earliest of my own articles put up on site goes
back to 1981 (in French and with a Unesco copyright ). The much
later fuller version is the pages on Scientific Method of
Elections. Recently, I was given a contract for an
article on direct democracy, for a forthcoming multi-volume
encyclopedia of science, technology and ethics, by a well-known
publishers. Anyway, I hope that you will find it worth
while to use my site as a source for your deliberations.
I don't wish to repeat my arguments here much beyond making a
formal recommendation to the Citizens' Assembly, as I made to
previous enquiries, that the single transferable vote is by far the
best voting system. STV's advantages are that the
voters are allowed to prefer the candidates in the order they most
want and every substantial opinion group -- not just party -- is
proportionally represented, depending on how many seats in the
multi-member constituency.
Party list systems, or mixed systems with single seats and lists to
give extra seats to small parties, are party-proportional but don't
let the voters rank their choice of candidates. The party bosses
alone order the election of candidates from the top of their party
lists. This is, in effect, an extremely undemocratic restriction of
the preference vote to party managers. STV
respects voters with a partisan order of choice but it also allows
voters to prefer candidates across party lines to show where a
country is actually agreed and more than a battlefield of opposing
party camps.By the same token, STV allows voters to prefer
candidates within the same party, acting like a primary within the
general election. With STV's kind of electoral power, the people
can steer the country the way they want it to go, rather than have
to put up with the dictates of a caucus and the special interests
or prejudices behind them, which can scandalously go on letting
down the public interest.
STV isn't the sole or complete remedy but it is a necessary
condition for the general interest to be served.
I can indicate very briefly the reason for STV's unique
effectiveness as a voting system but that doesnt carry much weight.
This is why I've refered you to my many pages on the
subject. Briefly, STV is the one system that offers
both a generalised vote and a generalised count. All other systems
either are limited to a spot vote, giving a single preference, or
to a single majority count, or both. STV offers a
'preference vote' that gives an order of choice and a proportional
count which extends a single majority count to a many-majority
count. (This is fully explained, with regard to the "Droop quota",
in my two web pages for British Columbia, and on other of my
pages.)
A slightly more technical way of saying much the same thing is that
the sciences are conducted by measurement. There are four scales of
measurement. STV follows all four scales. No other voting system
follows more than two. (This is explained on the first of my web
pages about Scientific method of elections). Supposing
the Citizens' Assembly does recommend STV, some flexibility will be
needed to accommodate the system to the geography and politics of
BC. The Kerley report recommended STV. (The Sunderland report for
local Welsh government has also gone for STV). Kerley is currently
being made law for future Scottish local government. Some of the
country is the most sparsely populated in Europe. Yet the committee
didn't recommend anything less than 2 member constituencies,
representing two-thirds the voters. Single member constituencies
represent only half the voters, even with an Alternative
Vote. (There are also weaknesses with AV's
counting method, which to a much more limited extent affect STV.
Opponents of STV like to make a big thing of the technicalities
involved. Ive proposed a remedy on my page about a 'Reversible
STV'. )
It's worth remembering Ireland's second referendum on STV, when
voters were given an option to have single member constituencies
using the alternative vote. Even in west Ireland, one of the most
sparsely populated areas in Europe, voters prefered to keep to
Ireland's constitutional minimum of three member constituencies,
guaranteeing a minimum proportional representation of
three-quarters the voters. The west Irish mainly supported the
biggest party but they didn't follow partisan self-interest. They
kept fair shares of representation in their communities.
Also, Ireland's turn-out was highest before the country's biggest
party whittled down the size of the multi-member constituencies, to
3 or 4 and the odd 5-member constituencies, to make the system less
proportionate, less representative of unconventional opinion. Thus
the biggest party gives themselves a bigger proportion of seats
than strictly warranted. This is still an excellent system but it
may be that the lack of more 5 member or a few higher member
constituencies, where warranted in densely populated areas,
discourages other than main-stream voters and has an undesirably
adverse effect on turn-out. Tho, current Irish turn-out is not so
low as US, Canadian or British.
Best wishes to British Columbians in your democratic endeavors.
levelCMS