"The theory and practice of free government centers at the ballot box. If the ballot fails rightly to express the will of the people we have a clear perversion of free government. It is notorious hat the result of an election is often contrary to the wishes of a great majority of the people," so saith the 1914 publication Preferential Ballot (University of Oklahoma Quarterly Bulletin, Sept, 1914).
"These facts are becoming so well known that men can no longer hold their heads among patriotic people and advocate the continuance of our present methods. The will of the people is so often defeated that many are losing confidence in free institutions and popular government, and the determination to introduce methods of voting that will give a fuller and freer expression of the popular will is rapidly becoming irresistible. The people can no longer be tricked by plausible arguments -- they demand results." This statement was #50 of a long digest of positive comments on Preferential Ballots in the 1914 publication.
Preferential Ballots were counted at that time using the Bucklin system. This system was soon to be disregarded. Instead, preferential ballots were found to create better results if they were counted and transferred using the Alternative Voting (also known as Instant-Runoff Voting). In fact, in 1913, a year before the date of this publication, Lethbridge had already adopted Alternative Voting, successfully avoiding the Bucklin pitfall. Then even AV was found lacking, and the first city in North America - Ashtabula, Ohio - adopted STV in 1915; the first in Canada, Calgary, in 1917. But AV remained a feature of elections for decades. Under STV systems, AV was used in the election of single representatives such as in by-elections and mayoral elections.
Alternative Voting is similar to Bucklin in the use of preferential ballots but varies in how they are counted.
A disadvantage of the Bucklin count is that a voters' second choice can be used against his first choice, while under AV a voter's second choice is not consulted unless the candidates that is his first choice has been elected or eliminated. Under this system, to be elected a candidate must have, or accumulate through vote transfers, a majority of the vote. This removes a source of unhappiness with the use of Preferential ballots, and lessens chance of forced return to First past the post (FPTP)
As #51 of the list states, "in the practical working of the preferential ballot, a voter indicates his first choice exactly as under FPTP. If any candidate has a majority of the first choices he is duly elected and the election is over.
If however no candidate has a majority of the first choices, we have to choose between the present method of declaring elected the one with the largest minority or permitting another choice.
If it were not for the expense and delay of a second election, that would be universally resorted to, as in Germany, and a second ballot as in conventions.
But a second election is not necessary. A second choice can be indicated on the same ballot that indicates the first choice, and all the expense and delay of a second election reduced to merely a recount of the first ballot and adding in the second choices."
This "wholesale adding in the second choices" was part of the Bucklin system, while under AV or STV vote transfer were made just where the vote involved would have been wasted otherwise. Bucklin though avoided problem under AV or STV, where the least-popular candidate is arbitrarily eliminated.
In a three-candidate election this might be an issue. As the Bucklin-ites of yore pointed out, perhaps the one eliminated may be the recipient of vote transfer that would allow him or her to pass the the two higher in the ratings and take a majority of the votes and the seat, with the support of the majority of the voters.
It must be admitted that this could happen on occasion, and not only in elections where three candidates run for one seat, but also in STV at the end of the counts, when there are only two seats remaining and only three candidates still in the running. The least popular candidate is arbitrarily eliminated and the other two win the seats. This is a frequent event - in many of the STV elections in Calgary and Edmonton, a couple MLAs were elected with partial quotas, that is, due to the number of candidates having decreased to match the number of remaining open seats. They did not have to exceed quota (the minimum generally needed to win a seat) because they were the last un-elected and un-eliminated candidates after the elimination of a candidate brought the number of surviving candidates down to the number of remaining open seats.
There is a political joke about why PM Justin Trudeau was in favour of STV (but not party-list pro-rep). It was said to be because if the Conservative and the NDP candidate in each district received 49 percent of the vote and the Liberal in each district received 2 percent, when a party was eliminated and the vote transfer happened, the Liberal candidate in each district, being the second choice of the other parties' voters, would pick up the seats.
Of course this is ridiculous - the Liberal is more popular than that in every district in Canada.
But it is also ridiculous and shows that the teller of the joke does not understand STV. If the vote totals are as pictured, it would be the Liberals in every district who would be eliminated and that party's votes would be transferred based on second choices to other parties, giving the seat to one of them.
In this pretend case, the Liberals would take no seats, not all of them, as predicted in the joke.
(But it seems the the joke does apply if Canadian elections used the Bucklin system, where second choice are lumped in wholesale and combined with the first choices. But luckily for the fairness of our elections we do not use that system so this pretend case should not be used against AV.)
Eliminating the least-popular candidate is arbitrary.
But this arbitrary elimination of the least popular candidate makes sense in a couple ways:
- at that moment, he or she is the least popular, and what better criterion can be used than that?
- often there is a large gap between candidates so the difference in vote totals that makes the least-popular the least popular may be sizable.
- But in the end it is arbitrary but no more unfair than the arbitrary declaration of the winner under FPTP when the leading candidate is declared elected, no matter the percentage of he vote and often with just a minority of the votes. At least under STV this arbitrary rule is used to determine the eliminated candidate, which may or may not determine the winner, instead of its use under FPTP where it determines the winner.
While STV has this sometime-problem, Bucklin, by allowing a voter's second choice to compete with his or her first choice, had a constant problem that encouraged voters to only mark one preference. Thus Bucklin elections eventually became very similar to a FPTP elections with no guaranteed majoritarian or proportional aspect.
AV and STV's problem does not lead to that dismal state of affairs.
Thanks for reading.
(See my blog "list of Montopedia blogs concerning electoral reform" to find other blogs on this important subject.)
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