The "Kamloops Armchair Mayor" (Rothenburger, CFCJ Today, Nov. 1, 2020) states
"The [U.S.'s] electoral college system is a distant cousin to our own first-past-the-post. The beauty of first-past-the-post is that it recognizes the wishes of voters in each riding. We don’t simply throw all votes into a big hat and pick a winner based on who has the most support in the province as a whole"
But I respond by saying that I don't think any pro-rep is saying give all the seats to the party that has the most votes. This sounds like how most U.S. state choose their electoral college seats. (In the election of the president, there of course could be no proportionality of final result but the election of the multiple electoral college seats for each state could be conducted through pro-rep, thus creating a measure of the popular vote.)
Pro-rep is based on proportional representation of all substantial groups or parties overall or on a district-by-district basis. Not the winner-take-all thing the writer apparently thinks.
District-level pro-rep such as created by STV allows
- local representation (even if in larger districts than the current small single-member districts, but still at the city or county level)
- proportional rep (at the district level), and even
- unequal voter-to-member ratio from district to district - if desired to overcome how urban voters could overwhelm rural voters.
RE: Rothenburger's statement "They [Fair Vote-ers] ignore the disparities caused when high-population urban areas are allowed to dominate the outcome."
I see the reason to over-represent the rural areas, although my outlook may not be popular right now.
I look at how City of Edmonton spent $600M of public money on a downtown arena and see it as proof that cities already have quite enough money and power without giving them equality vote by vote with the rural districts. Not when rural areas are losing their jr. high schools, and elementary schools are just hanging on by the skin of their teeth in many cases.
But I don't see how you could measure the "disparities" he mentions if you mean results of representation. The disparity occurs at comparison with voter to member ratios. But as some voters in each district - rural and urban - vote the same - there are Conservative, Green, Liberal and NDP voters - and more other types - in every district, does the ratio actually have any certain effect on representation?
It seems to me that pro-rep at district level (STV) would mitigate much of the effect of the unequal voter-to-member ratios anyway.
And anyways the unfairness under FPTP - where it can take 35,000 or 48,000 to elect a Liberal or Conservative but 235,000 votes in Alberta to elect a single NDP member - is much greater than any difference between rural and urban voters - a ratio of 7 urban voters to four rural voters was arrived at in the 1950s. A difference between the smallest in population riding in Saskatchewan and the most-populous one in Toronto is a factor of four at the most.
And there is also the disparity that arises from the fact that candidates win their seats with percentage of the district vote that ranges from 34 percent to 65 percent. Under STV, the great waste created by this would almost totally cease.
This waste is:
- 66 percent of the votes of a district are wasted when one candidate wins with 34 percent
- 35 percent at least of the votes of a district are wasted when a candidate wins with 65 percent. And maybe another at least 30 percent of the vote is wasted if you count the un-needed surplus votes from the overage.
But under STV every successful candidate uses no more votes to win than quota, and some are elected with partial quotas at the end. Quota is a bit more than the total number of votes divided by the number of seats. Where there are five to six seats, as usual under STV, waste decreases to 10 to 20 percent of the vote, or less.
It used to be estimated that in each FPTP district 40 to 60 percent of the vote is wasted. That was then. Now when you may have four or five major parties competing in a single district, the amount of wastage is bound to increase, to as large as 66 percent of the vote.
If the ratio of 7 urban voters to four rural voters was taken as a rule, the difference between urban voters and rural voters at that ratio - less than a 100 percent disparity - compares well to the crazy disparities and wastage under FPTP.
And pro-rep would mean that for example, the NDP vote in a Conservative rural area would not be ignored. Just as under pro-rep a Conservative minority in an urban setting dominated by NDP or Liberal voters would not be ignored.
So it seems to me, that, for now, we could accept a moderate rural-urban differential if it meant we were more easily able to get STV adopted across the province or country.
So I call for STV, because it will give us fair representation at the local level, in districts however you structure them.
=======================================
Comments