{"id":2847,"date":"2016-10-07T11:38:03","date_gmt":"2016-10-07T11:38:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/nayrb.org\/~blog\/?p=2847"},"modified":"2016-10-07T03:31:46","modified_gmt":"2016-10-07T03:31:46","slug":"electoral-reform-in-canada-introduction","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/nayrb.org\/~blog\/2016\/10\/07\/electoral-reform-in-canada-introduction\/","title":{"rendered":"Electoral Reform in Canada: Introduction"},"content":{"rendered":"

During the last Canadian federal election, two of the three major parties made electoral reform* part of their platform<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The goal was to find a better system for electing members of parliament than the current ‘first past the post’ system. Under the current system, a candidate can win a seat with (28.6%) of the votes in that riding<\/a>[1], and a party can win a majority of the seats in the country (54%) with a bare plurality (39.5%) of the popular vote<\/a>.<\/p>\n

This tends to lead to voter disillusionment, as many voters (rightly) believe that their vote has no chance of influencing an election. The ‘Per Vote Subsidy<\/a>‘ was one attempt to rectify this, by counting votes to fund political parties, so voters could feel that no matter where they were voting, their vote was doing something.<\/p>\n

So, we want to change this system. What do we want out of a voting system?<\/p>\n

At its most fundamental, the goal of a voting system is to provide a system for a peaceful transition of power. The way voting systems do this is by making people feel like they have a say in that transition of power.<\/p>\n

At the same time, you want the system to be quick, fair, and resistant to cheating (as there are millions of lives and hundreds of billions of dollars at stake).<\/p>\n

(I’m also assuming that we will continue to have a representative democracy, and the number of representatives will remain approximately the same. I’m also assuming that there will be political parties in whatever new system we come up with.)<\/p>\n

So: having a say, quick, fair, representative, and resistant to cheating. <\/p>\n

Having a say:
\n – Each vote should have the highest probability possible of changing the representation of the House of Commons<\/p>\n

Quick:
\n – The public should know the results within hours of the polls closing.<\/p>\n

Fair:
\n – Political parties should not be significantly inconvenienced by the electoral system for not having money.
\n – Any barriers to entry should be reasonable (number of candidates to be a registered party, number of votes to get deposits back, percentage of popular vote to qualify to get seats, etc…)
\n – The system should not unduly give power to very small groups (49\/49\/2 split, the 49 and 2 have equal power).
\n – The system should be ‘simple enough’ for people to understand. Currently, people vote for one person, one party with the same vote. A similar system being successfully used elsewhere in the world is a reasonable way to determine ‘simple enough’.<\/p>\n

Representative:
\n – There are a number of ways to be representative:
\n – Geographically
\n – Representation of party by population
\n – Minority groups
\n – Diversity of opinions<\/p>\n

Resistant to cheating:
\n – Secret ballot to reduce intimidation and coercion as factors
\n – Reasonable voter ID laws to increase voter turnout while keeping the risk of personation<\/a> low.
\n – Distributed counting makes the current system quite resistant to cheating. One would have to mess with the voting tally computers in real-time to change this. The fact that there is an anonymous paper record of every vote cast in the ballot boxes is also an important check on this system.<\/p>\n

Interestingly, the current system seems to do most of the above well, except for representative part (and the current voter ID laws).<\/p>\n

Next time, we’ll look at a list of options to increase the representativeness, and see how they affect the rest of the criteria.<\/p>\n

[1]Far more likely to induce voter disillusionment is when the party or parties that a voter supports has no way of winning a seat, such as the Conservative party in Trinity-Spadina<\/a>, or the Liberals or NDP in Red Deer<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

During the last Canadian federal election, two of the three major parties made electoral reform* part of their platform. The goal was to find a better system for electing members of parliament than the current ‘first past the post’ system. Under the current system, a candidate can win a seat with (28.6%) of the votes … Continue reading Electoral Reform in Canada: Introduction<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[11,37,29],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/nayrb.org\/~blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2847"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/nayrb.org\/~blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/nayrb.org\/~blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/nayrb.org\/~blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/nayrb.org\/~blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2847"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"http:\/\/nayrb.org\/~blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2847\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2854,"href":"http:\/\/nayrb.org\/~blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2847\/revisions\/2854"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/nayrb.org\/~blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2847"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/nayrb.org\/~blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2847"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/nayrb.org\/~blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2847"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}