Submission DIVINE-1343 (Online)

The present system exaggerates the power of the majority.

Minority views are not represented and not heard in the legislature.

Minority parties are not represented in the legislature.

We seem to oscillate from one arrogant party in power to the next arrogant party.

There is no genuine debate, merely posturing, pontificating, and berating the opposition. How can sound, thoughtful legislation come out of such an atmosphere? A legislator should not be an obsequious rubber stamp.

For legitimacy, representatives must be elected by a majority of the voters, not a plurality.

To have true debate over alternatives, minorities must be heard in the legislature. The primary task of a legislator is to enact laws only after careful thought and vigorous debate. The majority requires real input from minority representatives if it is going to enact laws in the public interest.

The system must be reasonably simple, workable, and cost effective, particularly if voters are going to accept it in a general referendum.

In all the existing ridings, representatives would be elected by a majority vote. If there were more than two candidates and no one got a majority, all but the two top vote getters would be eliminated. The second choices of those voters whose first choices were eliminated would be distributed to the two remaining candidates to determine the winner. This would result in fairer voting outcomes in hotly contested ridings and would likely contribute to a result that was closer to the actual voting percentages. The final legislative seat adjustment would be made according to section 2 below.

Assume 70 seats in the legislature. Also assume, for example, that the leading party got 50% of the vote and 50 seats, the second party got 35% of the vote and 20 seats, and the third party got 15% of the vote and 0 seats. The distribution of seats is way out of proportion to the actual voting percentages. The representation is equalized as follows:   a)  Start with the party that got the most disproportionately favourable distribution of seats. (Usually the leading party) It gets no additional seats. In the above situation, how many at-large seats must be distributed to the other two parties to reduce the leading party's distribution to 50%. A quick calculation shows that 30 additional seats are needed. Another calculation shows that 15 of these seats are distributed to the second party and the final 15 seats are distributed to the third party. Each party now has a distribution of legislative seats that is proportional to the overall vote it received.  b)  The losing candidates who garnered the most votes in the 70 electoral contests would get the at-large seats in the legislature. Thus, some ridings would have two representatives from different parties a good thing since these districts were probably hotly contested.   c)  Note under this system, the number of at-large seats is variable. The more the seat distribution conforms to the actual voting percentages, the less need there is for additional at-large representation. In the last election, this would have resulted in roughly 50 at-large seats and lots of unwelcome legislators returning to Victoria. It may be best to fix the number of at-large legislators (to 30, for example) and try to get the seat distribution as close as possible to the actual voting percentages.   d)  A minority party would have to reach a threshold of 5 to 10% of the total vote to get any at-large seats.