[EM] British Colombia considering change to STV

[James Gilmour]

Graham Bignell  > Sent: Thursday, May 07, 2009 4:10 PM
> This is one of the more amusing editorials about the proposal... 
>
http://network.nationalpost.com/np/blogs/fullcomment/archive/2009/05/07/national-post-editorial-board-first-egghead-past-the-post-wi
ns-b-c-s-referendum.aspx
> 
> "One sign that a society is running out of real problems is 
> that bored upper-middle-class types start inventing phony 
> ones. Thus do we periodically get initiatives aimed at 
> replacing our perfectly functional first-past-the-post 
> electoral system with some hybrid alternative that few 
> understand or support. In Ontario, this alternative — soundly 
> rejected at the polls in 2007 — was called mixed-member 
> proportional representation. In British Columbia, it’s called 
> the “Single Transferable Vote.”"

It may be amusing to those not directly involved, but the sneering "intellectual" who wrote that editorial could hardly have got it
more wrong.  Far from being a phony problem, reform of a defective voting system is fundamental to the health of representative
democracy.  The voting system defines and determines the relationship between the voters and the elected representatives.  That in
turn, determines the relationship between the elected members and their parties, and it also determines the relationship between the
elected members in the assembly (city council, state legislature, parliament) and the executive (government).

The voting system determines the balance of power and accountability of the elected members as between the voters and the political
parties that nominate most of the candidates.  Some voting systems make the elected members much more accountable to their parties
than to their voters.  Some other voting systems shift that balance, to a greater or lesser extent, in favour of the voters.
Correcting that balance is a real problem for society, not a phony one.  Those who pretend otherwise have often got partisan reasons
for opposing reform and trying to obscure this reality.

If it were not so serious, it would certainly be amusing to see first-past-the-post described as "perfectly functional".  I can only
presume that the writer of that editorial had not looked at the results of the FPTP elections in British Columbia or Canada over the
years.  BC, the other Canadian Provinces and Canada federally, all operate what is supposed to be (claimed to be) a "representative
democracy".  So the first requirement of the voting system is to ensure that the various elected assemblies are properly
representative of those who voted.  On that, FPTP signally fails to deliver.  And of course, in partisan elections, FPTP also makes
the elected members much more accountable to their parties than to the local voters.

James Gilmour

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