Vaughn Palmer, The Vancouver Sun

Voting under STV is easy —  it's the counting that's hard to explain

By Vaughn Palmer

The Vancouver Sun, 29 October 2004

VICTORIA - There's been a lot of talk about how B.C.'s existing electoral system might survive a referendum next year because the proposed replacement is so complicated.

That, at least, has been the comment of many observers of the Citizens' Assembly on Electoral Reform, me included.

But I had to stop and think about that concern after hearing a presentation from the assembly's chief researcher, Ken Carty.

He started off a session in Vancouver last weekend by holding up a thick binder. "How many people are familiar with this?" he said.

He was brandishing a copy of the B.C. Elections Act.

"This is the plumbing of the current electoral system," Carty said. "One hundred and sixty pages of fine print and legalese ... it's pretty complicated."

Carty pitched the argument another way later, when he met reporters after the assembly had wrapped up for the weekend.

He noted one of the main concerns about the current system is the poor match-up between winning votes and winning seats in the legislature.

In 1996, for instance, the B.C. Liberals beat the New Democrats by almost 40,000 votes but lost by six seats. The same thing -- a party winning the popular vote but not the government -- happened at about the same time in Saskatchewan and Quebec.

We all know it happens. "But it is not easy to explain why it happens," Carty said. "It is complicated."

And the full explanation would have to account for why it happens in some elections and not in others.

Political scientists will tell you that the winning party's vote was distributed more efficiently than that of the loser.

Chances are the losing party carried its seats by hefty margins, meaning there were sizable repositories of "wasted votes."

Meanwhile, the more efficient winner carried its seats with just enough votes to put it over the top and nothing more.

But does every voter understand how that happens?

Or do many of them simply carry around the vague sense of unease described by Carty, and wonder whether another system could produce a fairer result.

That alternative, according to the assembly, is a form of proportional representation known as the single transferrable vote.

"It's as easy as one-two-three," say the acolytes, quoting a slogan we'll hear again and again between now and referendum day.

Which is fair enough, as long as the explanation stops at the experience of a citizen going into the voting booth.

It's easy enough to imagine how one would number the candidates on the ballot in order of preference. But the system for counting the votes -- and translating them into seats in the legislature -- is another matter.

The complexities of STV counting was one reason why the system was rejected by Roy Jenkins, the brilliant politician and historian (since deceased) who studied electoral reform for the Blair government in the United Kingdom.

"The counting is incontestably opaque," Jenkins said in a passage that will likely be quoted in the coming debate here in B.C.

You won't get much argument on that score from this corner.

I've already made sport of STV , targeting the-soon-to-be-famous-if-the-critics-have-their-way Droop Quota and esoteric variations such as the Hagenbach-Bischoff method, the Hare-Clark system, the D'Hondt maximum number procedure and (my favourite) the modified Meek's 123 algorithm.

I don't envy the assembly staff, who'll spend the next three weeks translating the foregoing into a draft report for public consumption.

But I'm not sure that a full understanding of the counting system would be much help in grasping the real significance of a move to the single transferrable vote.

After all, I don't understand the inner workings of my computer -- just ask anyone in The Sun's tech support department. But that doesn't prevent me from using it every day, nor from being impressed by what it can do.

STV is a more proportional system. So there'd be more parties and more diversity in the legislature. Perhaps some independents would be elected as well.

More likely than not, no party would win a majority of the seats, and we'd get minority or coalition governments.

Advocates of electoral reform say the change would eliminate the winner-take-all aspects of B.C. politics, force parties to work together and minimize pendulum swings from left to right.

Critics worry about weaker administrations, backroom shenanigans between coalition partners, and political instability.

I lean toward the critics at this stage. But I also think Carty makes a good point.

STV might be defeated by too much head-scratching over the mechanics of the system and jokes about the Droop quota.

But that would shortchange a more important debate about the flaws in the current system and whether this is the right way to fix them.

vpalmer@direct.ca

[© Copyright 2004 The Vancouver Sun. Reproduced here by permission of The Vancouver Sun]