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Tom Monto

Jordan has had a more fair voting system than Canada - since 1993

Recently I said Jordan uses SNTV

This is wrong - it no longer does. Now it uses an even more fair system.


Jordan used Single Non-Transferable Voting from 1993 to after its 2016 election. But not now. Now it now uses a voting system that is even more fair...


An article issued before the 2016 election announced that a recent report showed there were many wasted votes under SNTV - (although there were no more wasted votes than under Canada's FPTP system - if Jordan thought change was necessary for that reason, it is long past time for Canada to change, as I am sure you would agree)


...She argues in the study that the tribal nature of Jordan's electoral politics, as well as the regime's strategic manipulation of the electoral rules, undermined strategic coordination and subverted the expected effects on the number of electoral competitors in parliamentary elections. The result: an overabundance of candidates competing in many districts, which, in turn, has led to a high proportion of wasted votes. "As a result, the majority of Jordanian citizens cast votes for candidates who do not win, leaving them without a stake in the current political system," Buttorff said (from https://news.ku.edu/2016/01/14/jordanian-election-law-changes-led-wasted-votes-professor-says)

and due to the wasted votes, that same article said Jordan was expected to go to an equally wasteful-of-votes voting system


"...The Jordanian government actually proposed a new electoral law last year, which will return to the block-vote system used in the 1989 legislative elections while retaining the reserved seats for women and minorities."

Why the writer did not think Jordan would not just add transferable votes - I have no idea. under SV there are only small number of wasted votes.


But luckily Jordan did not go to Block voting as expected but instead (Wikipedia tells me) Jordan's 2020 election was held under an even more fair system, one much fairer than Canada's:


The 130 seats in the House of Representatives consist of 115 members elected by open list proportional representation from 23 constituencies of between three and nine seats in size and 15 seats reserved for women.[8] Nine of the 115 proportional representation seats are reserved for the Christian minority, with another three reserved for the Chechen and Circassian minorities.[8] The 15 seats reserved for women are allocated to the woman in each of the twelve governorates and the three Badia districts who received the most votes but failed to be elected on their list.[9] So that is good news. Canada could learn from Jordan's example. SNTV would address many of the problems we now endure in Canadian elections but Jordan has moved even past that.

Canada is now the only major country that uses FPTP and only FPTP in federal and provincial elections in the world. Even UK and US have moved on. Even Jordan has moved past us. new slogan: Electoral Reform - Get into it. ==========================

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