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Tom Monto

PR Systems in North America - The Successive Stages

At the beginning of settler society in North America, elections used single-winner First Past The Post or elected multiple winners through Block Voting.


Dis-satisfaction with these systems was not long in coming.


By 1850s, various alternative systems were much discussed and even put into use in some jurisdictions.


Andrae in Denmark came up with a form of STV in the 1850s. (STV saw limited use in Denmark until 1915. In 1915 Denmark adopted levelling seats (list-PR top-up seats) and dropped STV.)


FOOTNOTE?: (Andrae's variant of STV did not include elimination of least-popular candidates but only transfers of surplus votes held by winners.)


Thomas Hare in Britain came up with the same idea about the same time. He envisioned all the MPs in Britain being elected in one at-large district.


Such a system would have allowed:

- a voter would be able to vote for any one of all possible candidates

- quota (effective electoral threshold) would be a small fraction of the overall population - and any group of votes with that quota, even if it is spread across the whole country, would be enough to elect a member.


sidebar:

Thomas Hare (1806-1891) published a book on PR Machinery of Representation in 1857. His concept was based on Single Voting in a multi-member at-large district (one covering all of the UK) with a method of transferring votes to prevent waste of votes through surplus votes being left with successful candidates. Later he added transfers of votes from un-electable candiates as well.

Soon, preferential voting (ballots bearing back-up preferences) became a part of his system. This has proved itself as being the basis of a family of fair proportional representation systems – although the systems as used today vary in some ways from Hare’s concept.


For elections of government bodies larger than cities (and even in some city elections) usually separate multiple-member districts are now used, to allow representation of local areas.


Mostly the Hare quota (one-ninth of the electorate in a nine-seat district, for example) has been replaced by the equally-effective Droop quota (slightly more than one-tenth of the electorate in a nine-seat district, for example).


Under Hare's method, simply dividing the vote by the number of seats constituted the quota. This is what we now call the "Hare quota".

Surplus votes received by a candidate (votes over and above the quota) were to be distributed 'at random'. The random-ness of the transferred votes being thought to ensure the transfer was composed roughly in same proportions as the candidate's total votes. (This whole-vote random method of transferring surplus votes held by successful candidates is now used in Cambridge (Mass.) city elections.

A different but similar system, the "Exact" method, sorts votes by the next usable preference before deriving the composition of the transfer. The "Exact" system is used for election to the lower houses in Ireland and Malta. It does not sort by all the preferences but only the next usable one so there is some potential for varying results due to happenstance. The Gregory system and its variants considers all preferences marked on the ballots so eliminates any potential for accidental results.) (Hoag and Hallett, Proportional Representaton (1926), p. 392)


Thomas Hare, a London barrister, unaware of both Hill’s and Andrae’s work, described a system similar to Andrae’s in his 1859 Treatise on the Election of Representatives: Parliamentary and Municipal.

A few years later, in The election of representatives parliamentary and municipal : a treatise (1865), he added the idea of successively eliminating the candidate with the fewest votes and transferring those ballots to the next (unelected and uneliminated) candidate on the ballot. This was the first system to include the fundamental elements of all future STV systems: ranked ballots with both transfers of surplus votes and transfers from eliminated candidates. At-large district was envisioned but this was soon replaced by the idea of multi-member district covering just a manageable part of the whole.)


The transfers of surplus votes conducted under STV may be done in a strictly random manner – by taking a number of ballots equal to the surplus at random from the ballots of the successful candidate and transferring these votes to the next available preference shown on the ballot (that is, to candidates who have not already been elected or excluded). This was the way Hare plan envisioned transfers, and it is the system used even still today in Cambridge (Mass.) city elections.)


But even in Hare’s time, mathematical calculation of the transfers was considered, using just the next usable preferences marked on all or some of the votes held by the successful candidate. This is the "exact" method. (Later, a more exact method using all the preferences marked on some or all of the ballots held by the successful candidate was invented (the Gregory method) – see 1880.)


sidebar:

1922 see my blog HARE SYSTEM OF PROPORTIONAL REPRESENTATION

REMEDIES EVILS OF PRESENT VOTING SYSTEMS


The Hare system, using an at-large district, would have produced very fine-grained proportionality. Electing more than a hundred MPs in one contest meant less than a percentage point of votes cast across country would have representation. But there was no certainty of local representation. (But on other hand, Hare would not have precluded local representation - any district where voters vote just for local candidates will elect one or more members if the group has at least quota.)


PR depends on pooling of votes to elect multiple members through some mechanism. This can be pooling of votes at-large (Hare's proposal) or in small(er) MMDs that divide the overall jurisdiction. MMDs, not being stuck with just one member and the need to have districts having roughy equal population, can fluctuate in size or number of members so already-existing entities can be used to set the districting - city corporate limits or county boundaries are commonly used; lower levels of government can use districts used in higher levels as MMDs (a federal riding can be divided into two or more provincial districts). But where geographic size allows, the at-large district can still be used. In cities, the geographic size is no limit - whole cities are smaller than the usual rural district. In cities the limit of district size is more often the number of members involved. It is possible to elect a city council of 12 or 14 in a single contest under STV. Staggered terms can be used if the number required to be elected are considered too numerous for STV.


An extreme example of how at-large STV can be stretched to elect a large body of members is used in NSW (Australia) where 42 are elected through staggered terms in two separate contests each electing 21 - across the whole state as an at-large district, where more than 3 M? votes are cast.


Shortly after Hare's publication of his STV plan, Catherine Helen Spence in far-away Australia read of his work and supported the adopton of Hare's plan for the Australian legislatures. Already by then she had seen the use of form of quota-based transferable voting used in a city election in Tasmania. Her father, the city clerk of Hobarts, had helped carry out an early election using a form of PR brought to the Island by an early fan of PR, Governor-General Hill. Spence would become the most valiant electoral reformer of Australia,


She wholeheartedly pushed for Hare PR in a pamphlet she wrote in 1861. (Later she introduced an innovation that is now used in most applications of STV.)


Spence wrote in 1880 that she recognized that the Hare system needed an innovation - multi-member districts.


Under "the Hare-Spence system" it was proposed to "divide the province into districts returning from six to ten members, which will give sufficient local interest but which will almost entirely stop log-rolling - that is, the buying the support of the two members of the district by concessions to local demands."


Spence introduced multi-member districts that while having multiple members, provided local representation.


Multi-member districts were actually used widely in early Canadian history. Although most were two-member districts, District Magnitude did rise to as many as four members in some of the cases. (A four-seat district was used in Victoria in 1870s.)

Usually Block Voting was used to elect the members in these MMDs so there was no intentional fairness - often one party made a sweep of the district's seats. But in the change to PR at least the pre-existing use of MMDs meant that re-districting was not required when STV was installed.

The use of Block Voting meant that seldom did DM rise above 5 and MMDs were more often used in city elections than at higher levels of government.

(DM is a product of both the number of districts and the number of total members being elected or serving in the chamber. A district seldom has more than 5 members, so if ten members are being elected, two or more districts were usually used.

But there are no hard and fast rules. DM may be larger than 5 more often when single voting (STV) is used than when Block Voting is used, due to large number of votes that would have to be counted with large DM and Block Voting. be counted. Ten MLAs were elected in Winnipeg city-wide starting in 1920 when STV was used, but prior to that seldom did a district elect more than five through Block Voting.

It may be that if the number of members to be elected was too large (or thought to be too large) to be elected at-large and districts had to be used, it could be that single-member districts were the natural choice. But sometimes multi-member districts were resorted to instead.

Edmonton, Calgary and Winnipeg all changed from at-large elections to multi-member wards before going to single-member wards. Edmonton did not make the change to single-member wards until recently (2010).


For more information on the MMDs used in Canadian historically, see

https://montopedia.wixsite.com/montopedia/post/canada-federally-and-in-the-provinces-and-territories-used-multi-member-districts-part-2


======================

Dissatisfaction with the existing FPTP or Block Voting inspired Hare and Andrae.

Andre's solution was put into use in Denmark but Hare never did to see his system put into use in Britain. As well, Cumulative Voting and Limited Voting was also put into use.


Gove System

Once known as the Gove system, or the schedule system of PR, it was invented by Walter Baily (1872 "PR in Large Constituencies") and endorsed by Massachusetts legislator William H. Gove of Salem and Archibald E. Dobbs of Ireland, author of Representative Reform for Ireland (1879)

The Gove system was another system proposed at the time (but never actually adopted for use anywhere.) It allowed votes to be transferred, if occasion required, at the direction of the receiving candidate,

A. votes could be transferred across party lines. (This opens way to ensure as many votes are used as possible and that simple vote splitting caused by existence of separate but closely aligned parties does not create dis-proportional result.)

B. voter had no control of where transfer went (although there were no surprises that way - the candidates did pre-set the direction of potential transfers in advance of the election).


All votes able to be transferred at the elimination or election of a candidate were transferred to one recipient


Some Gove systems varied - originally Baily ppictured lists being pre-registered nd the voter endomvotoing for a list, wit hte votes under it carrying al lgthe successive prefences laong with it.

But later the Gove system meant the the receiving candidate could then send the vote on to the next destination if such oportunity arose. There were two variants with even the candidate-driven process:

one variant gave the candidate sole (pre-set) discretion;

the other allowed candidates to pre-announce a list of potential recipients of transfers and the most-popular one on the list received the transfer.

The latter method had two advantages:

- it was more likely that the transfer would yield a winner.

- The vote would go to whom was the most popular among the voters -- not voters who cast the votes that were being transferred but the one who was most popular in the district, who was more likely to be the choice of those whose votes were being transferred.


Gove's inability to let the voter determine where his or her vote should go was one place where STV had it beat.


Despite this weakness, Gove seems a workable method to allow vote transfers without asking votes to mark back-up preferences. As well, it allows transfers to take place without actually gathering all the votes in one location which is required under STV. But it was never put into use (as far as I know).


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Proportional Representation A Practical Proposal (1884)

A form of list PR was suggested by British reformer John Westlake, Q.C.

see my blog on this topic


I don't know if Westlake's proposal was ever used. But the intent of his "free list" is very close to the intent of open-list list PR.


Systems such as Westlake's tried to allow vote transfers (which ensured high rate of effective votes) and for voters to direct first-preference votes to individual candidates, and securing proportional representation based along slate/party lines.


But already closed-list list PR and STV were taking over as the main forms of proportional representation.

============

in mid-late 1800s in the U.S.

attempts to address inability of FPTP and block voting (in the many Multi-Member districts that were in use) to produce Minority Representation (representation of majority (largest) party being certain in any system)

by using Cumulative Voting and Limited Voting (example 1867 in Pennsylvania)


Limited Voting was adopted in 1867 in Pennsylvania Penn 1867 (Hoag and Hallett, PR (1926)

Illinois adopted CV in 1870.


CV was called free voting at that time but due to the limits it put on nominations, it was not so free. (according to Hoag and Hallett PR (1926), p. 185)


these systems did not produce the results fondly predicted by their supporters.

their appeal faded.


1886 newspapers reported drop in reforms of this nature one claimed it was due to lack of any thoroughly satisfactory scheme of PR (Hoag and Hallett, PR (1926))


I am not sure how far slump of appeal went.

Alone of all the U.S. states (I think), Illinois continued to use CV That state continued to use it until 1980.)


(UK brought in partial use of Limited Voting in 1880. Birmingham's three MPs were elected by voters who only cast two votes each.


And perhaps the early peak of PR was not until 1880s in Canada due to the old-time delay in things coming to Canada.


Ontario Toronto brought in Limited Voting in 1886 for election of Toronto MLAs.

This was used again in 1890 but then suspended.


And then it seems Canada suffered the slump in PR sentiment that U.S. had previously experienced.


But elections still failed the voters and perhaps due to successful use of STV in Tasmania and other places in the British Empire, STV came into wide support.


But there was a regionality of STV and PR support in Canada.

In Canada PR and STV was never used east of Manitoba barring use of Limited Voting and Cumulative Voting), and to this day that is true.


Limited Voting and Cumulative Voting was never used west of Ontario and never used anywhere in government election in Canada after 1890 and 1910? respectively.


=======================

From Denis Pilon The Drive to PR in BC 1917-1924 (p. 2):


In the period between 1880 and 1960 only one form of proportional representation was seriously pursued in the English speaking world: the single transferable vote (STV). In the early twentieth century it was more commonly known as the Hare System, named for its founder Thomas Hare, a British barrister and contemporary of John Stuart Mill. For the purposes of this thesis, unless otherwise stated, all references to PR will refer to this system.

In fact, that was the custom of the day in newspapers and by reformers, as the Continental [European] systems of party-list PR were never popular in English-speaking countries.

In studying the drive for PR in British Columbia I could find only one exception: in Victoria a man involved in local labour circles once forwarded a party-list system; see Victoria Daily Times, February 9, 1921, p. 16.


===================

Despite STV's leading role as "British PR" that Pilon describes, some jurisdictions were moving to List PR.


A couple Swiss cantons (and perhaps other places) were using list PR as of 1895.


As well, some use was made of other alternatives: Cumulative Voting and Limited Voting.


Already Toronto's use of Limited Voting has been mentioned.


Cumulative Voting was used in England and Scotland in the late 19th Century to elect some school boards. (Wiki: "Cumulative Voting")


Cumulative voting was also used to elect city boards in Toronto starting in 1903.


The Proportional Representation Review (September 1903) described it like this:


Cumulative voting as applied to the Board of Control, means that each elector will have four votes but that he need not give each of them to a different candidate. He may do so if he wishes; but he has also the power to give all his four votes to one candidate. This makes "plumping" four times as powerful as it was by the old "block" vote system, when if you "plumped" for one candidate, you threw away three out of your four votes. Now you have the benefit of your full voting power, whether you plump or not. And plumping is the correct thing; in fact proportional representation is simply effective representation with the addition in the best systems of a provision for transfer of votes, so as to prevent wasting too many on one candidate... Besides permitting an elector to give all four votes to one candidate, the cumulative plan enables him to give two of his votes to one candidate and two to another, or he may give three votes to one candidate and his fourth to another candidate. In fact he may distribute or cumulate his four votes as he pleases.... If one-fourth of the voters give all their votes to one candidate, they can elect him, no matter what the other three-fourths choose to do....

(Thus Cumulative Voting if used carefully allowed for minority representation.)


==========


It was about that time that "Robert Tyson of Canada" -- a Torontonian - was influential in helping publicize STV. He lobbied for and spread word of STV at conventions of reformers in the U.S. He performed sample STV elections.


At the time. PR (the British form of PR) had little contenders - this was before list PR was used much although a couple Swiss cantons and other places were using list PR as of 1895.


Tyson breathed new spirit and methodology into the PR movement and although it took more than a decade to show rewards, STV would be the main system of PR used in North America.


Some cities in the U.S. did pursue Bucklin counting But under it voters soon refused to mark back-up preferences for fear they would be used against their first preference so Bucklin quickly began to behave like SNTV.


SNTV is an improvement over FPTP and Block Voting but STV was easily seen as the better system, better than Bucklin, better than CV or Limited Voting and certainly better than FPTP or Block Voting.


Two aspects of STV made it well suited to British/Canada/U.S. voters:

- under STV voters vote directly for candidates, not for parties.

- under STV voters vote for local representation. An STV district was not a very small single-member district that covered just a fraction of a city , but it was a district where the elected members did represent a particular area.


As well, STV ensured that:

- the vote would be used only for a particular candidate that the voter endorsed.

- the vote could be transferred across party lines if the voter desired and if occasion permitted.



STV was put into use in city elections in Ireland.

and STV was used for Johannesbourg (South Africa) city elections.

and STV was used for elections to the Christchurch City Council in 1917, 1929, 1931 and 1933, and for Woolston Borough Council in 1917 and 1919.


STV was dropped from use in Christchurch but did come back a decade later.


and then Ashtabula (Ohio) became the first city in North America to adopt it in 1913.


Other cities adopted it as well


STV became the most widely used form of PR in North America with 8 municipalities in the U.S. adopting it by 1930


And in 1917 Calgary became the first city in Canada to adopt it.


Eight? BC cities quickly followed suit but all but two of them had dropped it wafter one or two elecions.


But as Pilon ponts out (Drive for PR in BC) when future looked bleak for STV, more cities adopted oit

Winnipeg in 1920

Vanvouver , Victoria

Sask cities?

Edmonton


Pilon (Drive for PR in BC) posits that this new appeal was produced by rising Labour excitement (the general strikes of 1919) and Businees turning to PR as way to bulwark their own seats against possibility that Labour would take many seats over rep. Such happens often under that is produced by FPTP or Block votoing, but when Labour could take advantage of it, Business turned to more fair system.

Lethbridge later


By 1930, 20 municipalities in western Canada had used STV But by that date, only two major cities -- and a couple small ones -- were still using it.


And two western provinces were using STV to elect MLAs by 1924. No state in the U.S. has ever used PR to elect its politicians.

Western Canada's experience of STV is said to be the deepest experience of PR anywhere in North America at any time.


================================================

But even western Canada's use of PR was weak -

most Canadian cities that had STV dropped it by 1930, prov STV was dropped by mid-1950s.


This was weak at least as compared to Europe's use of PR

list PR was used in national elections in 1900 in Belgium, Serbia

and more countries and provinces/states used it every decade since.


By 1920 Denmakr was using district contests electing multiple members with overall nation-wide list-PR top-up (levelling seats).

=============================

But elsewhere in Europe, STV did find favour in two countries at that time.


STV came into use at national level in Ireland,


Malta came into use at national level in 1920-ish


Australia a bit later Nepal recently


(New Zealand

STV came back into use in Christchurch City Council elections in 1929, 1931 and 1933.


Mixed Member Proportional

Mixed Member Proportional (with single-member districts?) became a thing in 1949 when Germany adopted it (or was forced to adopt it by its occupiers).


MMP's meshing of single-member districts, FPTP and list-PR-style top-up promised to give advantages of both "local representation" and list-PR.


However, it does have some disadvantages.


The single-member district/FPTP part of the system is just as rife with dis-proportional results and wasted votes as any FPTP election. These are partially overcome through the list-PR top-up but overhangs sometimes are not. (Germany did reform its MMP system in 2023 to allow compensation to remove over-representation of the larger parties.)


The list-PR part of the system suffers same disadvantages as any list-PR system:

- voter has no say about to whom the vote goes within the party slate (a voter does not vote directly for a candidate)

- votes are not transferred even when voter would be fine with them going to someone else who could use it. the lack of transfers and the use of electoral threshold (a threshold of 3 to 5 percent of votes cast is common) means perhaps seven percent (NZ 2021) to 20 percent (Estonia 2008) of valid votes do not elect anyone.


And a further wrinkle is created by some MMP systems using different votes for district results and for overall representation. New Zealand's MMP has vote cast one vote for district contest and a different one for the party list allocation of seats. Not all but many cast their two votes differently - with small parties that are apparently thought to be incapable of taking the threshold being less favoured in the party vote. This is counter-intuitive as small parties would generally be thought to bvenefit from party PR while FPTP seldom benefits small parties.


The use of two votes and different voting from one to the other may mean that some see both their votes used to elect someone while others see only one or none of their votes used to help elect anyone.


Under STV, also not every vote counts. A quota of votes (usually about 13 to 16 percent) is likely to be unrepresented and a certain number (perhaps 30 percent of votes cast) are used to elect a candidate who is not the voter's first choice - but is someone the voter prefers over the others. People vary in the importance they place on the first preference being used versus back-up preferences.


An un-quantifiable measure of fairness is presented by the fact that under STV a voter may see his or her first choice elected but the vote not being used for that purpose. And a voter may see all of their first three preferences elected but again with their own vote not being used for that result.


One instance where that was calculated was in an analysis of the Cambridge (Massachusetts) city election of 2021:

- 90 percent of voters saw their vote help to elect a candidate;

- more than 65 percent of voters saw their first choice candidate elected, and

- more than 95 percent of voters saw at least one of their top three choices elected. (Wiki: STV).


Note that 95 percent of the votes were not used to elect the winners, but one or more of the voter's marked candidate-specific preferences were elected in 95 percent of the cases. So a high rate of satisfied voters.


It seems list PR secures about the same rate of effective votes as STV (sometimes less) but all the votes used effectively under list PR are first preference by party - with the voters having very little discretion as to which individual candidate the votes goes (the first listed candidates on the party list are the most likely to be elected).


STV elects some candidates wholly by first preference (in candidate-specific manner) and others partly by first preference (in candidate-specific manner) and partly by secondary preference (in candidate-specific manner).


The final result under STV may not be party-proportional to votes as first cast (first preferences) but is party-proportional to the votes as they are used in the end. This is achieved and made certain by fact that each elected member within a district is elected with about the same number of votes. Those elected by achieving quota are elected by exactly the same number of votes (at least it is the same when/if the surplus has been transferred away), and the others are elected by a number usually close to but less than quota.


===========================

Besides Germany, MMP was adopted by New Zealand in 1994 and nine other countries as well, mostly since 1990.


As well, there are mixed-member proportional systems that do not use FPTP. They are not included in the 11 MMP countries mentioned so far.


Denmark, for one, uses multi-member districts, each electing from 3 to 23 members, (and a single-member district or two as well) and list-PR top-up. Denmark elections are well respected for fairness and proportionality.


Denmark brought in this MMD-style MMP system in 1920 (although the size of districts and the electoral threshold has been tweaked since then).



The Urban-Rural PR system, endorsed (along with other PR systems) by Fair Vote Canada, is similar to Denmark's system except that U-R PR uses STV in MMDs in the cities ("urban") while Denmark uses list PR in the MMDs.


===================


so while CV and LV is not so publicized (although CV has at least one backer today),

the choices of STV, MMP and list PR are out there confusing issue.


as well as Urban-Rural PR and more

==================

the various forms of MMP and list PR mostly diverging on the district size question

or on ranked voting versus X voting


and even STV (as ever) is not just one system


MB changed its prov STV system used in Winnipeg in mid-stream

1920-1949 ten members elected at large

1949 -1955 three districts of four members each


Edmonton's use of STV used various DM: 5 then 6 then 5 then 6 then 7 (all with no re-districting, by the way - this shows a way that STV/MMDs save argument and expense)

other options are

consistent five member DM (Malta model)

varying district sizes Ireland model district DM ranging from 3 to 5


also we have Denmark model where some are single-member districts and most are elected in MMDs (DM of 2 to 23 in each (using list PR), with list PR top-up.


Urban-Rural PR is like that - some would be single-member districts and many would be elected in MMDs (using STV), with list PR top-up

Canada we look at all these options and can't (haven't yet) agreed -


I think many agree that

some members would be elected in single member districts in which case some form of top-up is needed


MMDs in cities using STV

DM un-defined 5 to 7 normal 3 to 10 well used in past 21 DM used today in one place in world


DM important as it sets effective threshold and inversely the rate of effective votes


DM of 19 means 5 percent is effective threshold (but some elected with more or less)

and that 95 percent of votes would be used to elect someone approx


even under STV in MMD city-wide, "local" rep (at the micro-local neighbourhood level) possible if neighbourhood voters vote for micro-local candidate and have threshold

same is true for MMDs that are used outside cities.


and that rep would be a local rep actually representing an "unanimous constituency" - people who actually voted for the member

======================

Others want list PR used at larger than district level -

province wide or even nation-wide is possible as long as ratio of rep prov by prov is kept same.


whether list PR or STV, effective threshold about same,

but STV's "utmost limit" of 21 is surpassed by list PR with DM of 100 or more being common under list PR.


STV more applicable than might be thought:


3 provinces have number of MLAs lower than STV's "utmost limit" - 21


Even Ontario elections could be conducted using just 7 districts with average DM being less than 21 and some elecgted through SMDs

list PR prov-wide would secure low effective thresholds:

3 percent in Alberta prov-wide.

,8 percent in Ontario prov-wide

(That could not be accused of just "tweaking the support that the big parties get" but is more open than many (Trudeau) wants to see)

nation-wide means .3 percent of votes would be threshold -- very low by most standards


even under list PR, local rep possible if local voters vote for local candidate and have threshold

and that rep would be a local rep actually representing an "unanimous constituency" - people who actually voted for the member


And some want both district elections and list-PR MMP


usually implied that MMP means SMDs and list PR top-up

Denmark uses both district members and top-up -- members elected mostly in MMDs


Rural-Urban PR may actually be considered to be MMP of a particular type, and uses MMDs in cities


===============

however things are done,

having all voters use same voting method (ranked votes or X voting) seems necessary simplicity.

irrespective of whether they are voting in MMD or SMD.


where ranked votes are used,

giving voters liberty to rank as many choices as they want seems proper.

Perhaps we don't need consistency prov to prov. - it would just make our messaging clearer - "cognitive ease."


"Make every vote count" - even if unattainable - seems good slogan and what Trudeau promised us

and even though any PR system would do that, voters/potential friends in the struggle would probably like to know what we propose.


of course when change happens, elected government will be formulating new system, not us ---unless we personally are in CA


so we don't need to have firm system in mind actually.


but if we don't, we may get IRV!

how much to say

what plan to propose

how much to leave to government are all out there.


in 1910s slogan was "PR with grouped consistencies"

meaning STV in MMDs


so perhaps with that in mind "PR through multi-member districts" might work

MMDs being -- well -- MMDs or province-wide and covering the top-up on top if used.


and PR being STV or list PR


or slogan "PR through Single voting and MMDs" to keep out Block voting and Cumulative Voting (sorry to those who like CV)

but those slogans would be seen not to include MMP that uses SMDs and no MMDs other than top-up.


I think we are in position of those of late 1800s -

we know what we don't like

and know we need change

and need a simple message and plan....


Where's Robert Tyson when we need him?

Or someone to convince us all of one simple way forward?


God knows it does not need to be perfect - just better, as long as it does PR (no IRV!).


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Alberta and Manitoba used IRV in districts where STV was not used when STV was used in some places, AB 1924 to 1956 Manitoba 1923 to 1954 and in that experience, we see that most members in IRV districts were the front runners in the first count, so would've been elected under FPTP I(if voters voted the same). therefore IRV results were not any more party-proportional than FPTP, as they would've been basically the same winners elected in each. as well of course, IRV being single-winner system many voters in the district, sometimes even majority, do not see their vote used to elect the winner. you could say STV "cheats" to raise its rate of effective voting. One winner system cannot make 80 percent of votes effective, so then just elect more candidates. STV increases number elected (other changes too of course) and that means more are happy. That is the kind of cheating that suits me. It is noted in 1930 publication Practical workings of STV ...* (p. 368) that the number of back-up preferences used to elect someone under STV is often exaggerated. 1929 Ashtabula 83 percent of votes were used effectively. 61 percent of voters saw their first preference elected. the same 61 percent saw their vote used to elect their first preference, because prior to the person's election the vote could not be moved because the vote was still placed where it might be used, and after the person's election apparently no candidate had much surplus votes. in other elections 72 percent of voters saw their first preference elected. but only 59 percent of votes were used to elect those winners. the difference being transferred away as surplus votes so generally about 60 percent of votes are cast for those who will win and are used to elect them, with no transfers ever happening to those ballots. As well, whether or not vote was used to elect anyone, 86 percent saw their first or second choice elected 91 percent saw one or more of their top three choices elected. (Harris, p. 368) why vote could be cast for a winner but not used itself to elect that winner is caused by: - the vote being part of surplus vote transferred away to someone else or - the vote (initially placed on someone else) being eligible for transfer to a successful candidate after he or she was already elected. This high rate of "satisfied without being used" is not measured in any usual analysis of proportionality or effective votes, and is not shown in the usual sort of STV vote transfer sheet either. But it makes sense. * Practical workings of STV ... #42 - The practical workings of proportional representation in ... - Full View | HathiTrust Digital Library


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Since then the PR world dropped Cumulative Voting (mostly) and split into two streams

- STV (the smaller stream) where voter votes one vote for an individual with back-up preferences

- list PR (the larger one). where voter votes for party of choice (with variants often used)


some list PR systems allow voter to show preference for indiv. cand. or to mark back-up party preferences.


But under list PR, party seems to be the most important aspect (votes generally counted for whole party slates and number of seats derived therefrom)


STV allocates seats based on votes placed on indiv. candidates but that placement could be/is mostly based on party label of the indiv. candidate.

it mimics what is said to be British style of voter-member relationship.


So still the question seems to be still un-decided.


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[[Single transferable vote|Single Transferable Vote]] (STV); a proportional system used in the [[Republic of Ireland]], [[Malta]],the [[Senate of Australia|Australian Senate]], [[Northern Ireland]], lower houses in [[Tasmania]] and ACT, and upper houses in NSW, South Australia, Victoria and Western Australia; in which the country or province or state is divided into multi-member constituencies; and each voter casts a single vote and ranks candidates in declining order of preference; (Farrell and McAllister, The Australian Electoral System, p. 50-51)



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