I feel that in the current electoral system too many votes are
wasted. It is appalling that parties often try to persuade voters
using a "don't waste your vote" argument but it is true that if a
voter's preferred candidate does not stand a good chance of winning
in his riding then he is wasting his time by bothering to vote at
all. The vote will have absolutely no affect on who sits in the
legislature. The party that wins the majority of seats can safely
ignore the issues of the loosing parties even though the majority
party rarely captures more than 50% of the vote. Democracy was not
supposed to work this way.
The system should be changed so that MLAs are elected by a
proportional system. Some argue that coalition governments (the
probable result in an election) are not stable and cannot
decisively implement a unified policy. I believe that the long-term
policies implemented by a series of coalition governments are
likely to be more stable than the massive policy shifts that we now
experience whenever the majority party is changed.
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