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Bill Tieleman, Georgia Straight10th November, 2004 :
Vancouver (Internal)
Single Transferable Vote Equals Multiple
Problems
The following column appeared in the Georgia Straight on
Wednesday November 10. Beneath it is a response submitted Thursday
by Shoni Field and David
Wills.
By BILL TIELEMAN
STV [single transferable vote] is a system designed for
political scientists and mathematicians, not voters....The local
government elections were a disaster and an international
embarrassment... -- New Zealand National Party MP Nick Smith,
November 3, 2004
While British Columbia's Citizens' Assembly on Electoral Reform
has overwhelmingly chosen to propose the province adopt a new
electoral system called "single transferable vote", New Zealand is
currently in an uproar over botched STV elections.
Local-government voters in New Zealand have been waiting for
more than a month to find out who won the elections, leading to
calls by Opposition members in parliament to scrap STV and go back
to the first-past-the-post voting--the electoral system currently
used in B.C. and Canada.
The complexity of the voting calculations and the delays,
errors, and confusion seen in New Zealand are just some of a long
list of serious flaws in the STV system.
The Citizens' Assembly consists of 160 ordinary British
Columbians who were picked at random and asked to study electoral
systems, then to recommend either keeping our existing electoral
system or proposing an alternative.
The assembly voted for change and picked STV over the more
widely used mixed-member proportional-representation system. A vote
on adopting STV will take place at the same time as the May 17,
2005, provincial election; if approved, it would be in place for
the subsequent election.
These well-meaning people have worked very hard and are very
sincere. But the system they are recommending is very, very
wrong.
For starters, why would B.C. change its way of electing members
of the legislature to one favoured in just a few places like
Tasmania, Malta, the Australian senate, and Northern Ireland?
Do Malta's 370,000 people know something about voting systems
that the rest of the world has missed? Are Tasmania's 472,000
residents on the leading edge of democracy?
But let's not pick on the fine folks of Malta. The problems of
STV apply equally anywhere it is used.
The short version of criticism of STV is that it is complicated,
confusing, prone to errors and delay, and not truly proportional,
and that it reduces local accountability, increases party control,
and allows special interests to dominate party nominations.
STV is based on voters ranking their choices for elected
representatives in multimember ridings, instead of the current
first-past-the-post system where they pick one candidate to
represent a single riding, with the winner being the person with
more votes than any other candidate.
The Citizens' Assembly has suggested ridings would have between
two to seven winning MLAs. Each voter would rank every candidate
from first choice to last, or rank any number they desired. Then a
computer formula would tabulate all the votes and announce the
winners.
To understand the multiple problems STV would introduce, let's
look at what might happen in Vancouver. Presume the "riding" of
Vancouver had seven MLAs to elect.
First, it's clear that STV would be similar to Vancouver city
elections. To get elected, candidates would need to win a large
number of votes across the city. That means less local
accountability and a need for big-budget, major-party financing to
win.
Second, the number of candidates would be staggering. If the
B.C. Liberal, New Democrat, Unity, Green, Conservative, Reform, and
Marijuana parties all ran full slates, there would be a minimum of
49 candidates. Then add any other parties and independents.
Third, just try to figure out how many votes you would need to
win election. STV requires the use of a complicated mathematical
formula to determine who is elected. You can choose between the
Droop Quota, which is: (voters divided by seats + 1) + 1 vote, or
the Hare Quota or at least four other alternatives.
Fourth, just try to figure out how best to use your vote,
because voting preferences are transferred. The candidate with the
lowest number of votes in a riding is eliminated, and their votes
are transferred to the voters' second preferences, and on and on
and on until the required number of MLAs are elected.
That means three things: voters will face a daunting task if
they actually want to knowledgeably rank all possible candidates;
major parties will strongly urge their supporters to only vote for
party candidates, with no second preferences; and you have to
totally trust computers to count the votes accurately, with no
scrutineers.
Fifth, the complexity will discourage voting and increase
spoiled ballots. In the New Zealand local elections for the
Auckland District Health Board, there were only 850 invalid votes
in 2001, before STV was introduced, but 12,349 invalid votes in
2004, amounting to 11 percent of all votes cast.
Sixth, if you dislike the problem of bloc voting dominating
party nominations now, watch out. Under STV, each party will need
to hold a massive nominating meeting to pick all seven Vancouver
candidates for office. If one candidate can sign up a majority of
those attending, that individual will also have the ability to
choose the other six candidates as well.
Seventh, the only way a third party or independent can win a
seat is if major-party voters decide in large numbers to throw them
a bone. But why would NDP or Liberal voters trying to elect their
parties to government give preference to other candidates who could
defeat their first choices?
Those who want to see proportionality--where a party that wins
10 percent of the popular vote gets 10 percent of the seats--are
out of luck.
The STV system is fundamentally flawed. Fortunately, for STV to
be adopted in B.C. it will take an overall majority vote of 60
percent to approve the change, as well as a simple majority voting
in favour in 60 percent of B.C. ridings.
And a simple "no" vote won't require quotas, preferences, or
computers to figure out.
Bill Tieleman
is
president of West Star Communications and a regular political
commentator on CBC Radio's Early Edition.
[©Copyright 2004,
Georgia Straight
and
Bill Tieleman. Reproduced here with their permission.]
--------------
Response submitted to the Georgia Straight
by Assembly members Shoni Field and David
Wills:
That Bill Tieleman is against changing our electoral system is
no surprise. Proportional Representation by Single Transferable
Vote (PR-STV) was designed for voters, not politicians or their
consultants.
What does concern us is the misinformation he included in his
recent column. Your readers deserve better.
Tieleman says that those who want proportionality are out of
luck. Not true. Any reasonably careful examination of PR-STV will
show that it produces proportional results. In the last election in
Ireland the Green Party won 6 seats (3.6%) on 3.8% of the vote.
This is typical of the results for smaller parties.
Tieleman suggests that you need major-party financing to get
elected. Not true. PR-STV is one of the easiest systems for
independent candidates to get elected. In the last Irish election,
thirteen of the 166 seats were filled by independents.
Tieleman says voters would face a daunting 49 candidates on
their ballot. Not true. A voter in a five-seat riding in Ireland
chooses from, on average, 14 candidates.
Tieleman suggests computer problems in New Zealand’s
recent local elections indicate flaws in PR-STV. Yet PR-STV has
been used without incident in Ireland and Australia for over 80
years, long before computers caused problems for any electoral
system.
Does Tieleman measure a system’s success by
politicians’ contentment? We use a different measure:
voter satisfaction. Voters want something better than the wrong
winners (1996) and excessive majorities (2001) of the current
system. PR-STV gives voters what they want: proportionality, local
representation and increased voter choice.
Citizens’ Assembly members
Shoni Field, Vancouver-Hastings
David Wills, Vancouver-Point Grey
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