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Tom Monto

"Extremism" and fair representation

The old line was that if under STV if an extremists were elected to just a couple seats, they will be sidelined and mostly ignored and their supporters thus trained if they want notice to elect something more mainstream. That was before media began to blow things out of proportion or anyways before media had the ability to communicate to tens of millions a one time. But still i am optimist that proper social programs - themselves a natural product of democratically-elected governments - will address the unrest that allows rise of crazy "out-theres" in large numbers.


A friend tells me that intra-party competition - candidates of the same party competing in the same election such s happens under STV - tends to work against extremist candidates who have to face off against other extremists. Being paranoid or having an ingrained confrontational nature, they fight all comers and make no friends. So there could be a psychological disadvantage to being an extremist in an STV election.


It is said that under STV candidates generally try to be conciliatory toward their opponents so as not to preclude getting vote transfers from any direction. Parties that cover much policy options or do not rule out much that do not antagonize supporter of others do better in transfers, it seems.*


In STV interestingly each remaining candidates usually gets at least some votes when say more than 50 votes are transferred. Voters use such varying things to decide their ranking that votes transfers go to all still standing. Jansen ("STV in Alberta and Manitoba") studied voter loyalty to party and in his writings you'll find stats on how some party have supporters that are more disciplined than others. But generally through the scattering of a party's initial vote, each party loses some of its initial support as measured by the combined vote tallies of its candidates. Each party loses some if its proportion of the vote and the seats count at the end is often the same proportion as in the initial count.

* This "umbrella party" aspect seems odd because STV on the other hand is credited with allowing candidates to speak their minds without party machine control. Under STV a person will get elected with just 1/6th of vote in the five-seat district, but under FPTP you need 34 percent or more of the district vote to take seat., although the the number of voters involved in a FPTP election is lower than the number involved in an STV election.


So two different realities --

FPTP umbrella party-- game theory says you need only two or three parties fighting for the seat,

while under STV you can have six or seven (or more) main parties or candidates fighting for seats, and a party/candidate only needs to seek 1/6th of the vote to ensure success.


Under either case a party/candidate with only five percent of the district vote (and little more potential) will not take a seat


But a person/party with less than 1/10th of a percent of the overall vote could take a seat in FPTP in a small district and that is the worry, if any, of extremists being elected, I think.


How many votes does it take to win a seat in different voting systems

based on Canadian numbers

STV

27M voters div. by 338 (number of seats in the House of Commons) = 80,000 X 5 (number of seats in five-member district, a common size in STV elections) = 400,000 (voters per district) X .67 (turn-out in 2019) = 268,888 div. by 6 (1/6th being quota in a five-member district, Droop Quota) = 45,000 to take a seat in an average 5-seat district (These 45,000 would not, of course, have to be all first preference votes, but could be a combination of first-preference votes and back-up preferences transferred from other candidates.)


FPTP (our existing system)

27M voters div. by 338 = 80,000 X .67 (turn-out in 2019) = 54,000 total votes in average in a one-member district so 19,000 could take a seat.

With sparsely-populated rural districts the amount needed to take a seat is even less.

The fewest votes used to take a seat in the 2019 federal election was 11,000 in Cardigan, PEI and 11, 000 in Desnethe, Saskatchewan.


(The degree of eccentric thought may also be inflated in such a place - church training or other non-government training being more common, public education being less broad and anyways even that being more often replaced by home schooling.)


That type of low threshold is how way-out candidates with geographically-concentrated support (occasionally) get elected. Such was the case with the victory of a "Western-Independence" WCC candidate in the 1982 Olds-Didsbury (Alberta) by-election. He won with only 4,000 votes, about 40 percent of the votes cast in the by-election. He had an advantage running in a by-election as well. By-elections are known to be good for opposition candidates. (His success was short-lived. A general election that same year took away his seat. The WCC party with 11 percent of the vote did not take any seats in that election. FPTP thus gives too much some times and too little other times.)

Party-list PR where 1/338th of the vote takes a seat -- no threshold (a party is not required to take certain percentage of the vote to get at least one seat)*

27M voters div. by .67 (turn-out) = 18M div. by 338 = 53,000 votes to take a seat so about the same number of votes as under STV.

with no need to use cautious language ..


*In some party-list systems, a party must have 3 or 5 percent of the overall votes to get any seats at all. In some Mixed-Member Proportional systems, if a party gets one or more district seats, then that is good enough irrespective of its vote percentage, to get top-up seats. In the case I use above, I assumed no threshold.


So the election of "extremists," which PM Justin Trudeau used as an excuse not to fulfill his promise to bring in electoral reform, can happen under FPTP. And sometimes it doesn't happen. But for sure in any FPTP election the party with the most votes gets far more seats than it is due. The second-place party usually does as well. And middling-popular parties get some seats but still fewer than is their due. The least-popular parties are (usually) completely shut out.


And that is why we need a more fair, a more logical , a more democratic system instead - STV or another form of proportional representation.


Thanks for reading.

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