STV is not suitable for BC. Claims about how it works are not
borne out in fact.
The BC Green Party is opposed to adopting an STV system in BC
because it wastes more votes and is not as proportional as MMP.
Submission by Colleen McCrory, Chair of the Green Party of
BC
There are a great many differences between Ireland, the only large
country in the world that uses a Single Transferable Vote (STV)
electoral system for all its voting, and BC. While both countries
have almost an identical population--about 4 million
people--Ireland is much smaller. Ireland is only 7.5% as big as
BC--a little over twice the size of Vancouver Island. There are
very few ethnic differences in Ireland, unlike BC, which has an
ethnically and socially diverse population and where fair
representation of minority groups in the legislature is important.
With a 166 seat parliament (called the Dail), Ireland has a ratio
of one member in parliament for every 24,000 people. Their
constitution states that a ratio of between 20,000 and 30,000
people per seat must be maintained . They have 42 multi-member
constituencies of 3, 4, and 5 seats. Originally there were equal
numbers of each kind of mult-member seats but that requirement has
been dropped and the number of 3 seat ridings has increased in the
last two revisions of their constituency boundaries. Finally,
unlike Mr. Loenen's proposal, which calls for single member seats
in the rural areas, there is a preponderance of 5 member seats in
rural Ireland.
Contrast this with BC. We have 79 seats, with each seat
representing approximately 52,000 people--more than double the
average in Ireland. We have a large and diverse ethnic population
and indigenous First Nations peoples. Our largest rural electoral
districts are larger than the entire country of Ireland.
Despite these differences, as Chair of the Green Party of BC, I
decided that we should contact the Green Party in Ireland and see,
from their practical experience with STV, how STV works. I also
wanted to check out some of the claims made about STV by Mr.
Loenen, who is the chief proponent of a modified version of an STV
system he calls Preferential Plus.
Before I begin, I must dispute two other claims made by Mr. Loenen.
The first is that his preferential plus; system is made in BC. This
is not true. An identical system to Mr. Loenen's (STV for the large
towns and cities accompanied by single member seats with AV in the
less densely populated rural areas) was proposed in England at the
1917 Speakers Conference. This proposal was not acted upon then and
the same proposal was rejected again more recently by a commission
on electoral reform in the UK for various reasons that also apply
to our situation. (See sections 92-107 of the report by the more
recent Commission on the Voting System in the UK in the late
1990s[the Jenkins Commission].)
The second notion that Mr. Loenen's asserts is that BC citizens
really don't want proportional representation. (See submission
Loenen
0875.) This is not true. The fact is that over 65% of the
people making presentations to your public hearings wanted some
form of proportional representation. When excluding the submissions
that were outside your mandate or that did not recommend a voting
system, the percentage goes up to 80%. Regarding the first 875
written submissions posted on the CA website (the number posted at
the time of writing this submission), 65% want some form of
proportional representation. Likewise, when submissions that were
outside your mandate or did not recommend a system are excluded,
that percentage again climbs to 80%. Mr. Loenen actually is
currently contradicting an earlier assertion he made about the
popularity of proportional representation (see media release below
taken directly from the Fair Vote BC website).
75% OF BRITISH COLUMBIANS BACK PROPORTIONAL REPRESENTATION
Wednesday, June 6th, 2001 - RICHMOND - Fair Voting BC Director Nick
Loenen welcomed the results of a poll commissioned by the
Calgary-based Canada West Foundation which stated that 75% of
British Columbians support scrapping the current "first past the
post" electoral system in favour of proportional representation.
The foundation's release noted that support for a system wherein
seats are awarded based on the popular vote received by parties was
highest in British Columbia among the four Western provinces. The
foundation's poll also covered other topics related to
representation issues including referenda and senate reform.
"This poll comes at a crucial time," noted Loenen. "In his
inaugural speech yesterday, Premier Gordon Campbell re-iterated his
government's commitment to creating a Citizens' Assembly on
electoral reform that will make recommendations about how to
improve our voting system, and to place such recommendations to
British Columbians in a referendum. When this Assembly starts
looking at alternatives, obviously the overwhelming support for a
more proportional voting system will be taken into account."
The BC Liberal government of Gordon Campbell follows the government
of Prince Edward Island in initiating a review of the current
system for electing members to provincial legislatures. The system
used by Canada has been scrapped by other commonwealth countries
such as New Zealand which replaced its voting system with
proportional representation in the 90s.
The Canada West Foundation survey is based on a total sample size
of 3,256. There is 95% certainty the survey results are within +/-
1.7% accuracy.
The entire summary of BNW SURVEY 5 is available at www.cwf.ca
"Research Projects".
___________________________________
Despite the fact that Fair Vote BC has been around since 1998
advocating electoral reform and its founder Nick Loenen advocating
STV -- which he admits is not a proportional representation system
-- STV and the several STV variants proposed for BC have garnered
little support. Only 37 of the first 875 written submissions to
your Assembly--less than 5%--have advocated STV. Of those, 10 have
come from outside Canada. Of the approximate 370 submissions made
at the public hearings only 20 supported STV -- a little over 5%.
Only one organization expressed support for this system, the
Taxpayers Federation of Canada.
An STV system is not suited to the geopolitical nature of BC and it
does not have popular support.
One of the major claims that Mr. Loenen makes for his Preferential
Plus system is that it will bring in less polarized and more
cooperative politics. Recently we asked a spokesperson for the
Green Party in Ireland specifically if that was the case in his
country:
Question - "Isthere strong competition within parties? How do
candidates cope with this?"
Answer - "Only the three biggest parties commonly have more than
one candidate in a constituency. Competition within parties is
intense. If the competition can be kept reasonably friendly then it
actually counts in the party's favour. It is not uncommon for
candidates of the same party to play dirty tricks on each other and
this usually is to the detriment of the party's prospects."
STV advocates also claim that this system gives "more voter
choice". In the case of the Green Party this is not the case as
shown by the answer to the following question.
Question "Do you [the Green Party] always run full slates of
candidates in every electoral district? If you run partial slates,
has this been effective in getting Green Party candidates
elected?"
Answer - "In the past the thinking was: run as many candidates as
you can to bring in the maximum number of first preference votes.
It is only in the last couple of decades that parties realized that
this was actually counter-productive. The more candidates you have,
the more votes go astray to other parties when they are eliminated.
The rule of thumb now is: run the same number of candidates as the
number of seats you hope to win. Unless the party is sure of one
quota in first preference votes then there is little point in
running a second candidate. The Green Party would rarely have one
quota (except in some town councils with nine or twelve seat
constituencies) so we rarely run more than one candidate. In the
past, local Green groups, not appreciating the thinking above, ran
two candidates and almost certainly threw away their chances of
winning even one seat. On average a Green candidate would only
transfer about 30 to 40% to the other candidate when
eliminated."
"If a party has more than one candidate the best thing is to have
the votes evenly distributed between your candidates. The best way
to do this is to carve up the constituency between them and send
them out looking for votes only in their designated areas.
Obviously it helps if the candidates live in different parts of the
constituency. Often parties actually say in the candidate's
literature: 'in this area, please vote No. 1 for Mary to maximise
the party's chances of winning two seats'. (An example of dirty
tricks is where a candidate circulates such a message on the eve of
the election when no such agreement has been made!)
"If the candidates votes are evenly matched then
they both stay in the count for as long as possible
accumulating the maximum number of transfers along the way. Also,
if there are three candidates in the race for the last two seats
and at the end two Fine Gael candidates have 10000 and 7000 votes
and the Green candidate has 8000 then FG would be kicking
themselves because they could have had both seats with the same
total number of votes if both candidates had 8,500."
With regards to voter choice, we wondered how all-candidate
meetings worked, when so many candidates were vying for
first-preference votes even against their fellow party candidates
in the same riding and therefore asked this question.
Question - "How do you have all candidate meetings when there are
so many candidates in multi-member ridings vying for attention"
Answer - "All-candidate meetings are not that common here (perhaps
for that reason). Special interest groups would often invite all
candidates to a meeting and let them fight for attention from the
floor. The main activities are leaflet-drops, door-to-door
canvassing and standing at shopping-centres, church gates etc. Many
candidates for the larger parties are of such low calibre that
their party will actively discourage them from debating with their
opponents! The media is playing an increased role, particularly for
the middle class vote but in some areas a politician appearing too
much on national media can actually count
against them. (Who do they think they are?) "
Advocates of STV continually claim that this system "weakens
political parties" and l"essens party discipline". This is not the
case in Ireland as indicated by the answer to the following
question.
Question - "Is there strong party discipline amongst elected
members (block voting along party line) or do Dail members vote
more independently? Do they consider the competition for votes at
the next election?"
Answer - "If a TD [member of parliament] did not vote with their
party it would be the first item on the national headlines.
However, it is common for them to vote one way in the
Dáil and go home to their constituency and assure their
voters that they had to tow the party line but they are fighting
for change within the party. At local level voting is much less
disciplined but what happens there is that, if a proposal is
unpopular in their own local constituency a councilor may vote
against it but make sure that their other party colleagues all vote
for it so that it goes through anyway".
We asked the representative of the Green Party about how he thought
their voting system could be improved.
Question - "If you could change your voting system, would you? To
what?"
Answer - "The only change I would make might be to elect maybe 2/3
or 3/4 of seats by the current PR-STV system and have it topped up
by a list system. There is a strong argument that PR-STV encourages
"parish-pump" politics. Especially when candidates from the same
party must vie for votes. They can't openly disagree on policy so
they have to give the impression of being best at 'getting things
done' locally."
In summary, the way STV works in Ireland is much different than the
claims being made by the advocates of STV here. The modified
systems proposed by Nick Loenen (Submission
Loenen
0035) or variants proposed by several other presenters will
provide even less proportionality than the Irish STV system does.
This is because the single and two member seats that they propose
to establish will give voters in those electoral districts no
chance to contribute to electing representatives of the party of
their choice except if they vote for the winner.
Moving to a system like Nick Loenen proposes or any other form of
STV would not provide universally fair proportional representation
for all BC voters. It would lead to more adversarial politics and
it also could have unknown consequences in the parts of BC,
particularly our cities, with large ethnic minorities.
Because of these shortcomings and the difficulty for an average
British Columbian to understand and explain how the votes are
counted, such a system would have little chance of being voted in
and the opportunity you have to reform our voting system to one
that is more democratic will be squandered.
I hope the Members of the Citizens Assembly listen to the
overwhelming majority of citizens who have offered input to your
process calling for true proportional representation and a "made in
BC" mixed member proportional system that voters can easily
understand and will enthusiastically endorse in the May 2005
election.
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