A Short Course on PR for Unions and Others of broad minds but little background knowledge of Electoral Reform.
Put up a short list of key words:
Representative democracy
Elections converts votes to seats
Majority
Votes
Proportional Representation
Districts
Limited voting
Single Voting
STV
List PR
Open-list PR
MMP
Here is talk on each of the terms listed:
Representative democracy
government is composed of elected members who represent their supporters
Some do better job than others
Some switch policies or parties and try to find new supporters
We elect specific people and people change and vary from control by others.
In addition to the human factor, the election system we are using is flawed.
the pont of this little talk is to show how it is flawed and how Canada can be converted to using a sytem of proportional representation, that is, a system where seats are allocated in such a way that each party gets is fair share of the seats and where a large percentage of votes are used to actually elect someone.
Elections -- convert votes to seats
our current system is First past the post or winner take all.
only one member is elected in each district
myth goes that they are elected by majority choice but that is myth - usually in more than third and somtes more than half the districts the member is elected with only support of a minority of voters in the district.
Majority
majority is more than half.
you will never have a member elected with support of all the voters
pleasing most of them - more than half - is best you can do.
but when three or more run, usually the largest groups is merely a minority, less than half.
and in that case the majority of votes cast - even if split over two or more parties - is not represented while the minority is.
in Canada's situation we see the Liberals and NDP parties together getting half the votes that is where they are now in many districts. They are quite similar in outlook, at least right now,
and we see the Conservative candidatre sometimes taking the seat with less than half the vote in the district.
on such occasions, less than half the votes are used to elect the district members.
Votes
People want their vote to count - they want their vote used to elect someone.
They also want to express their opinion and vote for someone who will if elected represent their view in the chamber.
Some are prepared to vote for someone they don't hate to help prevent someone they hate from being elected; Others stick to their opinion and vote, hell or high water, for the candidate that represents their views, even if they believe that that candidate has little chance of being elected.
with any voting system, only votes cast for the most popular candidates are elected.
First past the Post takes this very striclty - only one is electred in each district.
Only votes cast for the one winner in the district are used to elect anyone.
oher election systems allow more flexibility. as we'll see.
FPTP uses X voting.
With X voting, if you vote for a candidate who comes in second or lower in popularity, then the vote is wasted.
Some proportional representation election systems overcome those problems by using:
multi-member districts - so more than one group can elect representation in a district
ranked transferable voting - where if a vote is cast for someone who is unpopular, the vote may be transferred to another candidate who has more chance to be elected.
In other systems, multi-member districts are used and seats are allocated to specific parties based on the percentage of voes they revceive. the winers bing those upermost on the party lists asembled by the party brass.
Both of those see a large proportion of votes used to elect the winners. and both ensure that each party gets about its due share of seats.
They do it in two different ways, but both are about as effective as the other under the same circumstances. We'll get into that later.
What is Proportional Representation?
Parties whose candidates take many votes take many seats,
Parties with few votes take just one seat or none at all.
Districts
today we are using single-member distrcits in federal and provincial elections
Many but not all city elections use single-member wards to elect city aldermen and councilllors.
but In Canada's history, multi-seat districts were quite common.
This may be surprising so I'll say it again -- Canada had a deep and wide experience of using districts with multiple seats.
Winnipeg for 30 year eleted its MLAs in a ten-seat city-wide district.
A voter anywhere in Winnipeg used the same ballot as anywhere else in Winnipeg
A voter anywhere in Winnipeg had the same choice of candidate, and the votes were pooled across the city when they were counted and seats allocated.
Edmonton and Calgary echelected more than four MLAs in city-wide district for 30 years.
Toronto was a three-seat district at one time.
Two-seat districts were common in each other province, even as late as the 1990s.
Mostly these multi-member districts used block voting where each voter could cast as many votes as the number of seats. sUneer such system fair results were a matter of lchance.
But in severl cases fair election systems were used in these multi-member districts
Limited Voting
Toronto voters could cast up to two votes to fill three seats.
Limited Voting meant no one party could take all three seats when the minority choice had support from at least a third of the voters.
The fairness of Limited Voting in a three-seat district was limited -- only two parties at most were represented in a three-seat district.
Like with any X voting, many votes were wasted, but because multiple members were elected in the Toronto district and because two parties saw one or more candidates elected, most voters had someone elected that they agreed with, even if one or both of their votes was not used to elect anyone.
Another system had all the benefits of Limited Voting with more fairness, but also some of its disadvantages.
Single voting
each voter marks an X, each voter has one vote.
if we have MMD of five seats but each voter has just one vote, then the five most-popular candidates are elected.
Some candidates will be super popular and they will hog the votes that go to the party they belong to. so some parties usually get fewer seats than they deserve.
Other candidates will be not so popular. with X voting being used, gthere is no ability to transfer votes and and some candidates who might have accumulated more votes through transfers have no chance to do so.
The five winners can be easily determined.
the vote breakdown might be like this:
A 11 percent
B 9
C 8.5
D 6.5
E 5.5
F 5
G 4.9
H 4.8
I 4.6
J 4.4
4
3.5
and so on down to least-popular candidate who got less than half a percent of votes cast.
Only A to E are elected. Those five candidates have only a total of 41 percent of the vote.
The five winners each came from five different parties and about 59 percent of the votes were cast for candaites of of those parties, so 59 percent of voters likely had an elected member with whom they share opinions.
But as with any X voting, many votes were wasted and the parties' share of seats was not proportional to parties' share of votes.
One party ran three candidates in this district. It received enough votes to take two seats but got only one.
The next system we look at is much like single non-transferable voting but we give it ranked votes. that allows votes to be transsferred if they would otherwise be wasted.
Voters have more chance to elect someone they prefer even if not their first choice; parties get seat counts that better reflect their vote counts.
(The percentages are actual election results -- Vanuatu 2020 eleciton - Efate District)
STV
We keep the multi-member districts and give each voter the chance to mark back-up preferences - to be used if the candidate who is their first preference has no chance to be elected.
As well, a quota is determined and candidates who receive more votes than they need to be elected see their surpus votes trasferred to possibly help others of same party or of a similar party.
Because each winning candidate receives about same number of votes, each party receives about its right share of the seats. of cource sometimes voes can trabsfer from party to party so final set couint reflects how vtoes are transferred as well as how votes were initially cat.
Parties whose candidates take many votes take many seats,
Parties with few votes take just one seat or none at all.
The back-up preferences marked by voter gives assurance to large proportion of voters that their vote will be used to elect someone.
List PR
voters mark an X for party that they prefer.
vots are totalled.
seats are allocated to parties and parties fil their seats based on the list they made up in advance of the election.
each party gets it due shreof seats.
But voters have no control over which person their vote will elect.
Open-list PR
a form of list PR allows voters control over how the vote is used.
this is called open-list PR and voters can mark vote for individual candidate.
the vote is counted as a party vote but the most-popular candidates of the party will fill the seats.
MMP
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