We currently have a constitution that allows referendum-free electoral reform.
For those who worry about governments changing and re-changing systems -- like Italy, the problem for us is more caused by how few times governments change the electoral system than from having too many changes.
We already have a referendum-free electoral reform system.
We have had changes at the provincial level and small change even at the federal level - but no change (except one) ever has been done after a referendum.
Ontario provincial once had Limited Voting (a form of SNTV).
Alberta provincial and Manitoba provincial switched to the use of STV and AV systems then back to FPTP.
BC provincial switched to AV then back to FPTP.
Many provinces - and federal elections - have used multi-member/ multiple plurality in some districts and FPTP in others, but now they use FPTP everywhere.
Franchise in all provinces - an aspect of the electoral system - has been extended to adult women, to 18 year olds, and to other groups, with no referendum - except 1915 BC men voted on whether or not to extend voting to women. That appears to be the only time a form of electoral change (broadly defined) has been done after a referendum.
Right now, government do have freedom to change electoral systems without referendums - and seldom do.
The last was BC dropping multiple-member districts in 1980s.
Putting the system after a change "into cement" - making the new system permanent - is impossible.
What a government does can be un-made by any government later - and perhaps making something like that permanent might be self-defeating.
Any law passed by one government can be changed by any future government. That 's just the way it is.
But like people are saying in this stream, if the constitution can be changed formally or its legal interpretation massaged and refined to enshrine political equality and PR, then governments would be pushed to change toward PR and any change away from PR would be unconstitutional or at least evil-looking.
Previous instances of electoral change were temporary as we see now. but Alberta and Manitoba did use PR-STV partially for eight and nine elections respectively so those were good long stretches. By the time they switched to FPTP in 1950s, anyone who had voted in FPTP provincial elections had to have been at least 50 years old.
There was fight back, just not enough.
It is said that in Manitoba the only ones to object was the Communist Party (the NDP was in government when the switch was made),
on the other hand in Alberta the only one who wanted to change to FPTP was the Social Credit government - but that was enough.
Perhaps with more fightback the switch might have been stalled.
But AB and Man, then AB by itself, were stand-outs when every other provincial government and federal elections were using FPTP (or FPTP and Block Voting), and people were not complaining about those elections despite the unfairness.
Most people either do not see the inequality, see it but benefit from it , or see it and don't care.
But success in one place leads to success elsewhere at least temporarily.
Calgary brought in PR-STV for city elections in 1917 - the first in Canada- due to it being a pet project of a city commissioner inspired by its success in Tasmania and in one place in the U.S. - a small city of the name of Ashtabula, Ohio - and by Lethbridge's adoption of Alternative Voting. Those were the PR successes up to the time when Calgary adopted PR-STV in 1917.
soon there were more...
soon the British government forced the Republic of Ireland and North Ireland to adopt PR-STV, to avoid civil war Belgium adopted PR about the same time for the same reason
Malta adopted PR-STV. Why I don't know unless it was just quest for fairness.*
it was mass labour unrest and a general strike in Winnipeg that made it possible (or necessary) to bring in PR-STV in city and provincial elections in Winnipeg, to prevent political violence/civil war.
mass farmer unrest (and lesser-dramatic general strikes in Edmonton and Calgary) helped elect a United Farmers government that promised electoral reform - and then went through with it.
Reason for this was farmer/labour/socialist/anti-war/bank-reform movement that recognized it had gotten little representation under FPTP during 16 years of Liberal machine rule. The WWI Conservative/Union government was not seen as an attractive alternative - it was seen as being for the eastern factory owners and wealthy people who owned shares in corporations. (The profit-making CPR was hated across the west.)
The movement's recognition of the need to get rid of FPTP was made easier due to many UFA-ers, being U.S. immigrant farmers, having a shared heritage and political backgrounds in western U.S. populism (which already by then had included calls for PR).
from "Kansapedia Kansas Historical Society" on-line "populism"
"These Populists [of the 1880s and 1890s] wanted to change the monetary system to make currency more readily available; to create income tax with a sliding scale based on earnings; to put railroads, telegraph, and telephones under government control; to prevent foreign ownership of land; and to overhaul the election process, giving the public more control.
Champions of populism wrote newspaper articles and toured the country delivering lectures on the reform movement. Mary Elizabeth Lease and Annie Diggs, both of Kansas, became popular advocates of the People’s Party. Though the two women disagreed on certain principles, they each helped place Populist candidates in office." [These are methods that PR-ers could use now]
after the PR pioneering work in Calgary, many BC cities, then Winnipeg, then Vancouver and Victoria, then Edmonton, then Lethbridge adopted PR-STV.
The process generally being
a city councillor,
usually assisted by involved volunteer/amateur activists/scholars, perhaps with past experience in a city already/previously using PR,
and perhaps the city clerk, decided PR was good and necessary. and no one really objected.
This is demonstration of a certain amount of adventurous spirit among elected or appointed officials (absent today).
But WWI and the 1920s were a particular period of political ferment. so the adventuring spirit was there. due to new faces bing elected and new political forces being at play.
We could be in a very similar one now - but the situation needs to heighten and deepen today before the mainstream media loses its grip on the popular imagination / is made to loosen its own self-imposed censorship on discussion of electoral reform and anti-capitalism. (perhaps recent public revelation of right-wing basis on social media is early sign of a loosening.)
We seem to have long way to go before we get to the same level of political unrest as we had in WWI or 1920s.
But appearances can be deceiving.
The 1971 Alberta election was quiet and then the votes were counted and lo and behold we had a new government.
As I point out in recent blogs (Lougheed's 1971 win looked alot like any FPTP election and Now looked alot like the old - Lougheed's 1971 victory just another dis-proportional result), it actually took very little change in voting behaviour in 1971 to get a whole new government.
If there is any saving grace of FPTP (there isn't but if there is) it would be that it gives us the chance of changing government, Its sheer random-ness does mean there is chance to change government in a way that a scientific system would not provide.
The difference between an overwhelming SC government in 1967 and an overwhelming Conservative government in 1971 was Conservative vote increasing by 140,000, while SC vote increased by 40,000.
There was no collapse of the SC vote.
the size of the Conservative win was an accident of FPTP.
Conservative vote in 1971 was less than 47 percent of votes cast but Conservatives won about two-thirds of the seats.
in 24 districts the Conservative candidate did not take majority of the vote - but won the seat anyway.
Conservative candidate won majority of the vote in 25 districts.
SC candidates won majority of the votes in 13 districts and won 12 other seats by minority of the votes.
but the media describe the election as a great turn-over, a Conservative juggernaut.
in 1971 NDP vote had dropped by 6,000 votes and the party took one seat - Grant Notley was elected, when it had taken no seats in 1967 with more votes.
Notley was elected in Peace River with the support of 3,000 voters (his total vote count 3,000) while tens of thousands of NDP voters in Edmonton and Calgary were ignored.
He represented their interests anyway and the NDP vote count went up the next election and the NDP still took just one seat.
same in 1979.
finally in 1982 NDP took one seat in Edmonton, the first won by the party in Edmonton since the 1952 PR-STV election in Edmonton.
yes, the electoral system used does make a difference. and yes FPTP is almost random in its result.
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The media also misses the reality of the recent Edmonton city election.
One article saw the result as city voters voting against the status quo.
What really happened is that the group that through sheer random-ness happened to take seats did not include many incumbents running for re-election.
These incumbents ran for re-election:
Knack re-elected 12,000 votes
Esslinger not re-elected 4,400
Dziadyk not re-elected 5400
Paquette re-elected 8200
Caterina not re-elected 1500
Hamilton re-elected 10,000
Cartmell re-elected 16,000
Banga not re-elected 4000
total: 61,500 votes for incumbents
average 7900 votes per incumbent candidate
Six of the successful non-incumbents were elected with a lower vote count than that.
so the problem was one of distribution of the pro-incumbent vote.
If the incumbents were a party, the large number of votes that went to Knack and Cartmell were not used to aid the other incumbents to be re-elected.
As it was,the incumbents had nothing in common except being incumbents. Incumbent Paquette is NDP and incumbents Cartmell and Dziadyck were endorsed by Nickel, a Trump-style former city councillor running for mayor.
So to speak of voter's support for the status quo as proven by whether or not incumbents were re-elected is not logical.
But it is the kind of election analysis media engage in.
Perhaps because they do not understand the accidental nature of the near-random FPT P system. They do not see that only a minority of the votes cast were used to elect the successful candidates so how the voters voted had little effect on who was elected.
Who was elected does not show whether voters city-wide endorsed the old city council or not. The votes in each district merely affected the election in that district, with one candidate winning with far many more than necessary (81 percent of the vote) and others in other districts winning with less than 28 percent of the vote in the district.
Whether you won or lost had less to do with how many votes you got than whether or not you got more votes than the second-most popular candidate in the district, no matter how many that was.
Or the media understand about the failings of FPT and talk of such illogical things to try to distract us from thinking about the accidental nature of the near-random FPTP system. just saying anything to try to fill up the pages or to fill the airwaves.
Let's do our bit by guiding the media to see the light and guiding the general public to be more discerning in what they read, listen to and ponder.
Thanks for reading this long rant.
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Footnote on Malta:
* Malta is unusual in that it is PR with a two-party system.
In Malta, like in Ireland (and unlike the reason for its use in Canada) STV was not brought in to address polarization but to get a system where polarized politics would not cause political violence and perhaps civil war. (Ask yourself if PR helps Catholics and Protestants work together or was it a system where the two separate sides granted the other just the bare minimum of representation that their votes demanded but no more?)
It is expected in Canada that PR will give more emphasis to NDP-friendly Liberal candidates and to Liberal-friendly-NDP candidates and perhaps less extremely-conservative Conservatives, but in Ireland (I think) it has not encouraged Catholic-friendly Protestant candidates nor Protest-friendly Catholic candidates. And in Malta a very large portion of voters vote a straight party slate. Labour and Nationalist voters are in two separate camps with little overlap. (PR does ensure that each camp elects its fair number of seats.)
There was once multiple parties in Malta, but Malta politics has shifted to a two-party system, although any voting group that can get 1/6th of the vote in a district gets a seat. (The reason might be that this is a higher threshold than five percent, the number often used for party-list PR systems.)
(It just goes to show how flexible PR can be and how individual national or local politics makes PR perform differently.
Another example -- Ireland elects many Independent candidates but Canadian STV elections elected few.)
An interesting on-line article (https://www.um.edu.mt/projects/maltaelections/stvsystem/howmaltavotes) has this to say:
Political competition in Malta is marked by a high degree of partisanship. Divisions among the political parties are sharply drawn; political discussion is often heated; and there have even been a few instances of political violence in recent years.
Intense partisanship goes hand in hand with a high voter turnout at elections. Maltese voters have the highest turnout figures of all Western democracies.
Also, they show their partisan commitment at election time by remaining impressively loyal to their political party. Even though the electoral system permits it, voters hardly ever split heir voting preferences among candidates of different parties (in 1992, a mere 1.2% of the Labour votes and 2.0% of the Nationalist votes were transferred to candidates of another party).
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