[EM] British Columbia voting-method reform

[VoteFair]

On 2/4/2018 7:00 AM, Kristofer Munsterhjelm wrote:
 > ...
 > An interesting question would be why the US doesn't have multiple
 > parties. As far as I understand, the different parties in Canada have
 > strong local support (in different areas of the country), and that's
 > what keeps Duverger's law from destroying them. But for some reason that
 > hasn't saved US third parties. Could it be an effect of presidentialism?
 > Or a corporate power thing? It is odd.

Vote splitting, combined with the use of single-mark ballots, easily 
accounts for why the U.S. has only two parties.

Yes, regional affects in Canada account for the Bloc Québécois party -- 
which is dominant in the French-speaking province of Quebec.

As for Canada's other main parties, the Conservative party is on the 
political right, the New Democratic party is on the left, and the 
Liberal party, according to Wikipedia, is somewhere in the center.

The fact that Canadian citizens have to pay money to a political party 
in order to vote in their party's nominating convention is very 
different from the U.S. where any voter can sign up to vote in any 
party's primary election.  I don't know to what extent this helps to 
account for the difference.

Yes, the fact that presidential elections allow for only two parties 
surely contributes to the difference from Canada, where the voters do 
not directly vote for their Prime Minister.

I doubt that corporations account for any significant difference.

Richard Fobes


On 2/4/2018 7:00 AM, Kristofer Munsterhjelm wrote:
> On 01/17/2018 06:57 PM, VoteFair wrote:
>> On 1/17/2018 5:45 AM, Greg Dennis wrote:
>>  > It will be interesting to see which methods ultimately make it on the
>>  > referendum ... and which method they use to choose the winner of the
>>  > referendum :)
>>
>> I was told that the choice would be done using IRV (instant-runoff
>> voting)!  Ironically that's not one of the options.  Of course that's
>> because it's not a proportional method, which is clearly their primary
>> goal.
>
> That's unfortunate; I still think the New Zealand double question setup
> is the best one, where the referendum both has a yes/no question and a
> "which method if yes gets majority" one. (The question of what election
> method to use on the "which" section is another matter, of course.)
>
>> For anyone not familiar with Canadian politics, they have more than
>> two main parties, which makes their election results unpredictable and
>> surprising, especially regarding party proportionality.  That's why
>> election-method reform is likely to occur in Canada before it occurs
>> in the U.S. (which is similar to what happened for women getting the
>> right to vote)
>
> An interesting question would be why the US doesn't have multiple
> parties. As far as I understand, the different parties in Canada have
> strong local support (in different areas of the country), and that's
> what keeps Duverger's law from destroying them. But for some reason that
> hasn't saved US third parties. Could it be an effect of presidentialism?
> Or a corporate power thing? It is odd.