I am not a resident of British Columbia, but hope that my
experiences of using the First-past-the-post (FPP) and Single
Transferable Vote (STV) systems of voting can help your
decisions.
I am writing to you in a personal capacity, although I am the
elections officer for a scientific society which uses the STV for
its internal elections. I administer the counting process.
I would like to recommend to you STV in multi-member consituencies
(i.e., the system used in the Republic of Ireland) as an electoral
system, because:
a) it maintains a geographical link between representatives and
the electorate;
b) provides electorates with a choice of candidates from each
party;
c) leaves the final say of the candidate selection with the
electorate rather than with internal party committees;
d) leads to greater (although not perfect) proportionality in terms
of seats for votes;
e) tends not to lead to single-party government (although this is
still possible where one party is actually dominant in terms of
votes)
f) does allow minority parties and special interest groups
representation, albeit with a relatively large 'threshold'.
A weakness of STV is that the counting process can be time
consuming, and apparently complex. However, if BC is also
considering a move to electronic voting, then the count could be
immediate. It is only time consuming where paper ballots have to be
physically handled. In the elections that I supervise, voting is
carried out electronically, and I have produced an Excel
spreadsheet that counts the votes as soon as the data is entered
(you can access this via
http://www.shef.ac.uk/jonmay/stv.
I note that you seek to retain compatability with Westminster
elections. Well, please don't wait for us! We are notoriously slow
at adapting to the present day. Nevertheless, the Richards
Commission has recently recommended STV for elections to the Welsh
Assembly; they were used for the Ulster assembly; the Scottish
Parliament has voted in favour of them; and they are currently
under consideration for local council elections and regional
parliaments. European elections are currently conducted via party
lists within mulitimember seats, and there is every prospect of
this changing to STV (The European Union is supposed to adopt a
common system). Soon Westimster will be the odd part out of our
democracy, and may well change too. It would be a shame for BC to
have retained compatability with a system that even Westminster has
abandoned!
levelCMS