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Submission TILLEY-1350 (Online)

Submission By Joseph Tilley
AddressSurrey, BC, Canada
Organization
Date20040813
CategoryElectoral system change
Abstract
It is one of the many benefits of mixed member proportional systems that they can be tailored to the unique characteristics and needs of whatever jurisdiction has chosen to adopt them, something BC can take advantage of. [3 pages]

Submission Content
I would first like to begin by expressing my gratitude and appreciation to all members of the Assembly for the hardwork and dedication they have shown to their task. I applaud each and every one of you for your own contributions to this very important and ground-breaking process as well as all members of the public who have made submissions, attended hearings and shown an interest in the health and future of our democracy.

I have been very strongly in favour of Proportional Representation (PR) since 1990 and specifically in favour (since 1994) of some form of mixed-member system (MMP/AMS). I have no set-in-stone fundamentalist views on the exact form and nature that such a mixed-member system should take--indeed, that is one of the many beauties and benefits of such systems, that they can be tailored to the unique characteristics and needs of whatever jurisdiction has chosen to adopt them. Having looked over a great many of the submissions made to date, it is quite clear that a consensus has emerged amongst the interested public in favour of some form of mixed-member system rather than the unwieldy and deeply haphazard Single Transferable Vote (STV) system.

I was originally a supporter of STV many years ago (pre-1994) because it is a system that looks and sounds great in theory, but does not quite work out well in practice. Meeting, speaking with and learning from some Irish MPs (or 'TDs' as they are called) who are not fans of STV because they have experienced its dodgy nature in practice for many years also helped bring me to this view.

While I do not doubt the ability of the voting public to be able to understand how to mark ballots under STV, the notion that the system's outcomes would actually make real sense to people is doubtful. How can one claim that it is democratic for the second, third and fourth choices of supporters of fringe parties like Natural Law, Marijuana and others to determine outcomes of an election? Yet under STV (and its sister system, the Alternative Vote) that is precisely what would occur. The accumulated votes of a winning candidate would be a hodge-podge of second, third and fourth choices of other voters and second, third and fourth (and even fifth and sixth) choices of yet even more voters, and so on and so forth, all reduced to mere fractional values. The election outcomes depend largely on pure accident and chance: i.e. which candidates fail to be eliminated in the early stages of the count. Indeed, had even a small cluster of voters marked their preferences in even a slightly different order the results can be radically different. This defies basic common sense. I could go on and on about this in several pages but plenty of academic work and analysis of these flaws has been done and I am sure (and hope) that members of the Assembly have examined such works or will be examining them in their deliberations. STV can be a good system for electing upper houses like the Senate or municipal government bodies, but as a system for electing the chamber in which governments are formed it is very inappropriate.

As the title of the excellent book "Mixed-Member Electoral Systems: The Best of Both Worlds?" (a book I certainly hope all Assembly members will be diligently studying) puts it, mixed-member systems do indeed offer the best of both worlds. A mixed-member system preserves the virtues of the present First-Past-the-Post (FPTP) system while correcting its defects. Under our present FPTP system, a voter must use one vote to try to pick, among other things, who he/she believes would be the best local representative, the party he/she supports and who he/she would like to see form government. Rarely do all voters get to cast a vote that exercises all three important choices effectively--and one all too often comes at the expense of the other two. In making these choices under FPTP, voters must also factor in whom they would not like to see be their local representative and whom they would not like to see form government and in assessing those things their choice is affected--often adversely. That is where the beauty of a mixed-member system kicks in as it solves this dilemma by providing every voter with a two-vote ballot. Voters can assess who is the best local representative without worrying about where they live determining the value of the vote for the party of their choice.

Since a consensus does seem to have emerged (based on the submissions to date) around a mixed-member system, the question then becomes 'in what form?' Some submissions have called for a mixed-member system consisting of a list/top-up element of roughly 15-20% (and called this 'PR Lite') rather than the 50/50 ratio between constituency and list/top-up members that exists in Germany. In my view this would be a good compromise. It would also help solve the legitimate concerns about PR that some have expressed (and, indeed, the only concern that I believe has merit)--namely, that it provides disproportional power to smaller parties. With a smaller list/top-up element this would help provide an important psychological reminder to smaller parties not to overstep their bounds.

The other reason a smaller list/top-up element would be better would be to prevent constituencies from becoming ridiculously large. Furthermore, under the MMP/AMS system as it exists in Germany and New Zealand (and unlike in Scotland, Wales and Italy, among other places) it is the 'party vote' which determines the overall number of seats that each party is entitled to and if the number of constituency seats a party has won exceed their overall share of seats as determined by the party vote an anomoly can occur known as 'overhang seats'--resulting in the total number of seats in parliament being enlarged to accomodate this. I severely doubt British Columbians would be very keen on this and therefore a mixed-member system in which the party vote is treated as a seperate top-up to the constituency results rather than the crucial election-outcome determinant would be far preferable (and this is what exists in Scotland, Wales and Italy, among other places).

Whether the MLAs elected from the list/top-up element would be elected from province-wide or regionally-based lists is the next question that would need to be answered. It might be interesting to experiment with province-wide lists for two elections and then examine afterwards how that has worked or else devise some sort of region-by-region topping-up formula as did the UK's Jenkins Commission in their electoral reform proposals. Regions could be based on clusters of constituencies and the top-up seats could be allocated via some sort of formula based on the election results region by region. There are so many possibilities as to how this could all be done and in deciding that, as with everything else, I wish all Assembly members the very best of luck.

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