Vaughn Palmer, The Vancouver Sun

By Vaughn Palmer

The Vancouver Sun , 23 September 2004

VICTORIA - As a selling point for a new voting system, it might be hard to improve on the following pitch from one of the presenters to the Citizens' Assembly on Electoral Reform.

"No political party will ever advocate this option. That alone speaks volumes."

The speaker was Nick Loenen, a former politician and member of the B.C. legislature.

Loenen chaired the caucus of Social Credit MLAs when it moved to oust premier Bill Vander Zalm in 1991. For the past decade he has been a leading advocate for changing the B.C. electoral system to weaken political parties and strengthen local representation.

Those goals resonate strongly with the assembly, whose members appear to hold political parties in almost as little esteem as they do the current, first-past-the-post electoral system.

Loenen's remedy  — laid out in a presentation to the assembly at the opening of its decision-making phase Sept. 11 — is a variation on the single transferable vote or STV. He calls it a made-in-B.C. system, mainly because it works to preserve representation in the hinterlands and especially the north.

But he is not alone in recommending the system, nor is its advocacy confined to the side of the political spectrum he represented when he was a Socred.

The assembly also entertained a strong STV-based presentation from Julian West, a former Green party executive turned New Democrat.

The system, like any innovation, requires some explication. But the easiest way to approach it is from the perspective of a voter preparing to fill out an STV ballot.

You'd no longer mark an X beside the name of one candidate, as in the current system.

Instead, you'd be invited to make more than one choice, numbering the preferences in order, as you saw fit. "It's as easy as one-two-three," say the advocates of what is sometimes called "preferential" or "choice" voting.

And from the point of view of filling out the ballot, it is. The complications arise when you examine how votes are translated into the filling of seats in the legislature.

In the commonest version, B.C. would be divided into multi-member constituencies, each returning between two and seven members, depending on population concentrations.

Local candidates would be elected on the basis of the support they received, as expressed in those 1-2-3 preferences. The actual counting is more complicated, relying on mathematical quotas and computers.

Indeed, this is the point where the casual observer would likely conclude that there is nothing simple about the single-transferable vote. But several things ought to be noted.

First, those numerical choices allow people to pick and choose among local candidates.

They can split their vote, giving a first choice to a candidate from one party, their second choice to another, and so on.

Even if their first choice doesn't make it, their other preferences might, so their vote would not be "wasted," the way it often is in the current system.

This picking and choosing, while empowering voters, is what lowers STV in the estimation of political parties. They worry that the system would encourage local candidates to resist party discipline, thereby increasing their profile and attracting broader support in the constituency.

The multi-member aspect, combined with the weighting of preferences, makes it more likely that representatives of more than one party will be returned from each constituency. The resulting legislature would probably be more proportional to the popular vote than under the current system, and represent a broader range of views from each constituency.

None of this is a given. Each point is debatable. But it helps explain why STV gets serious consideration from advocates for electoral reform.

STV looks to me like other main contender for electoral change in B.C., second only to mixed-member proportional representation or MMP.

MMP, in the commonest version considered by the assembly, offers less local representation than STV and more power to political parties. But there are alternative versions of MMP, which would weaken the hold of political parties and strengthen local representation.

Hence there is a genuine debate between the two systems within the assembly, which meets again this weekend.

In the end it may well come down to an argument over which option is more familiar and easier to explain.

For assembly members are increasingly aware that their inclinations won't bring about change unless their recommendation is approved by the public in a referendum next spring.

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Footnote: STV is readily confused with the system known as alternative voting (AV), which was used in B.C. in 1952 and 1953.

But AV, relying on single-member rather than multi-member constituencies, does not deliver the same degree of proportionality as STV.

vpalmer@direct.ca

©Copyright 2004 The Vancouver Sun. Reproduced here with permission of The Vancouver Sun.