Sean Graham's submission to the Alberta Legislature in support of DMP [2015] (available on-line)
Graham criticized Alberta's FPTP system saying "A majority of voters in the most recent election – 54% – didn’t contribute to electing a candidate. Stated differently, 54% of the votes cast in the last election were wasted."
That is probably the percentage of votes cast for successful candidates district by district, but actually in this case the election of Notley's government, as over due as it was, was based on even shakier ground, democratically speaking.
The NDP took a majority of the seats despite taking only 41 percent of the votes. So 59 percent of the votes was ignored, as far as government and power went anyway.
Graham also criticized Alternative Voting, a system often presented as a worthwhile replacement for FPTP.
from Sean Graham's submission,
"Given the recent discussion of using the Alternative Vote (AV) at the federal level, it is worth giving a brief comparison of AV and DMP. One of the most important ways DMP differs from AV is that it always, and only, considers the first choice preferences of voters. AV, on the other hand, creates a new type of inequality between voters. While some would get the privilege of electing their preferred candidate, many voters would have to settle for one of their lower ranked candidates. Worse still, some wouldn’t see their vote count at all. As a result, AV would produce the same poor quality results that have come to be expected from SMP."
But to say "While some would get the privilege of electing their preferred candidate, many voters would have to settle for one of their lower ranked candidates. Worse still, some wouldn’t see their vote count at all" seems overly critical. Even under DMP, not all voters will see their choice elected. That is normal.
AV satisfies a majority of voters but only if the back-up preferences of some votes are considered as satisfying them.
IF DMP is to do more than AV and have absolutely everyone "see their vote count," it could only be through voters being satisfied if a candidate of their party is elected some place in the province or some place in the country. Obviously there is no way even under DMP that every voter will see their preferred candidate, in their district, elected. So it seems Graham is criticizing AV for something that DMP itself does as well.
On page 4 Graham states:
"Replacing SMP with Dual-Member Mixed Proportional would ensure that the choices of Alberta voters are accurately reflected in the Legislature. This would be accomplished by making sure that every vote counts and that each vote is treated equally. Additionally, DMP would distribute each party’s seats more evenly across the province, ensuring better regional representation within party caucuses. Lastly, it would improve how Albertan’s are represented at the local level by electing candidates from two different parties in a majority of districts."
Every vote may count but not to elect the local candidate. Only to be combined with votes of the same party cast elsewhere to together help elect a candidate perhaps in a third district.
STV with its multiple-member districts, achieves the goals of DMP presented in this paragraph:
each substantial group in each district will take at least one seat.
each city or district elects mixed representation, thus each region (or province in federal elections) will elect mixed representation.
no one party can make a clean sweep of an area. STV like DMP prevents artificial regionalism that is currently produced by FPTP.
STV has larger districts than DMP would have. Some of the districts under STV will cover entire cities, perhaps with 10 seats, while DMP would cap district size at twice the present size.
But conversely STV would produce more varied representation than DMP.
While DMP prides on how "it would improve how Albertans are represented at the local level by electing candidates from two different parties in a majority of districts," and Graham analyzed the 2015 Alberta election and estimated that that under DMP all of Edmonton MLAs would have been from just three parties (NDP, Conservative, and Liberal).
But STV can claim that it would elect perhaps four parties in a district, a much more diverse and fair mixture of the city voters. That anyway was often the result when Edmonton elected MLAs throgh STV from 1926 to 1955.
And STV today would likely produce the same varied result. A quick guess at the result, based on Graham's numbers, yields that under STV, with Edmonton split into two districts, each with about 10 MLAs, quota (the amount needed to win one seat) would be about 9 percent. NDP would have won seven seats, Conservatives two and Wild Rose one seat in each district. And it is expected with with STV more small parties would get more votes.
Under either DMP or STV, NDP would have won fewer seats in Edmonton but would have won more seats in Calgary. Alberta's FPTP system gave over-representation to the leading party in each city - the NDP in Edmonton and the Conservatives in Calgary. (This is the same as how FPTP operates in federal elections. FPTP gave the Conservative almost a total sweep of Alberta seats in the last federal election, while a fair system would have given the LIberals and NDP about five seats.)
And we can expect that with elections being more competitive, with each substantial party getting some representation in each city, that the vote for the smaller parties would increase. Voters would stop self-controlling themselves, they would engage in less strategic voting if they knew that their vote would not be wasted even if cast for a smaller party but would instead aid their party. If they knew their party would receive its fair due whether small or large, they would feel more liberty to vote for the party they truly want to see elected.
That means that whether DMP or STV was adopted, votes would be handled more evenly with more consideration, and voters would cast them in a different way than they do now.
But the hidden method of DMP makes the allocation of the vote more of a mystery.
STV has the advantage that the winner in each district are the ones with the more votes cast in the district - whether the vote counted is a first choice or a secondary preference.
But in DMP votes cast in one district would be used to help elect a candidate in a different district The way it works is more of a mystery. Thus adoption of such a system would likely be seen as a leap of faith in a way that adoption of STV would not be.
Plus the fact that STV was used successfully in eight Alberta provincial elections and is now used in elections in three countries and in a North American city, while DMP has not been used anywhere so far. So DMP is more of an unknown than STV.
At least that is my opinion.
Thanks for reading.
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