There are no extenuating circumstances or unique strengths that justify our continued use of First Past the Post.
We do not get the government or opposition that we voted for, and whole regions are often not represented in Cabinet.
When 40% of the votes can win 60% of the seats and 100% of the power, the government believes it has a mandate to do what it likes, rather than what the voters want.
Where parties have "safe seats", nomination meetings count more than elections. And political parties would rather keep a weak, elected MLA than risk replacing one.
It fuels polarized policy-making, seesaw governments and partisan posturing, leading to instability.
Check out the links below to read what a number of well-regarded people have said about how poorly our current first past the post voting system serves us.
Original text at http://andrewcoyne.com/columns/2007/09/case-against-first-past-post.php
Democracy, as everyone knows, is a system of majority rule. It is a system marked by free and fair elections between rival political parties, their success or failure depending on the number of votes they can attract. It is a system in which every adult citizen has an equal say in choosing who should represent them.
By every one of these definitions, Canada, under the electoral system in use today, is not a democracy....
By every one of these definitions, Canada, under the electoral system in use today, is not a democracy. We are not governed by majorities, competition between parties is not free and fair, nor do their relative fortunes depend on their popularity with the voters. Most striking of all, we do not give every citizen equal say at election time. Everyone may get one vote, that is true. But some votes count more than others. Some -- most, in fact -- do not count at all.
That is the record of plurality or "first-past-the-post" voting, the system Ontario voters are to be asked to replace in next month’s referendum. Its supporters appeal to a sentiment of “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” But it is broke, and this is the opportunity to fix it.
Consider some of the results of recent elections. In Ontario, an NDP government was elected in 2000 with 37% of the vote. In British Columbia, the NDP won a majority of the seats in the 1996 election though it received less than 40% of the vote -- not merely fewer than a majority, but fewer than its nearest rivals, the Liberals.
These are hardly unusual. In 26 federal elections since 1921, there have been 16 majority governments elected, but only two that actually commanded a majority of the vote. The rest were minorities posing as majorities, wielding undivided power though as many as five voters in eight voted against them. Supporters of the status quo cite its tendency to produce stable majority governments. But these aren’t majority governments. They’re legalized coup d’etats.
False majorities are but one of the distortions to which the present system gives rise. It is not unknown in this country for one party to take all or nearly all of the seats in the house, with 60% or less of the popular vote -- as happened in B.C. in 2001, and New Brunswick in 1987. The 40% of the public or more who voted for other parties, with other philosophies, were effectively disenfranchised: entitled to vote, but not to representation, which alone gives votes meaning.
Small, startup parties, like the Greens, know what it’s like to be shut out. In the last federal election, the Greens obtained more than 660,000 votes, nearly 5% of the popular vote -- yet they got zero seats. Nor is that injustice restricted to the smaller parties. The 27% of Albertans who voted Liberal or NDP in 2006, but got no seats; the 38% of Ontarians who voted Conservative or Alliance in 2004, but got two seats; the majorities of Quebecers who voted for federalist parties in every election since 1993, only to see the Bloc Quebecois take a majority of the seats -- how much different would our history have been had our electoral system not presented, time and time again, such a false picture of the country?
These anomalies and distortions are reflections of what goes on at the riding level: The winner is not the candidate who receives a majority of the votes cast, but simply the one who comes in first place. With four candidates, it can be done with as little as 25% plus one of the vote. The other 75% of the voters are rewarded for doing their civic duty with … bupkus. All in all, between one-half and two-thirds of all the votes cast in a given election are, in this sense, wasted.
The practice of giving representation only to the winning party is what biases the system against smaller parties, or against larger parties that are in a minority in a given region: a party’s success depends not on now many votes it has overall, but how well it can bunch them geographically. Hence the Conservatives, in 1993, won 16% of the vote nationwide, and were rewarded with two seats, while the Reform party, with 18.7% of the vote, won 52 -- two seats fewer than the Bloc was able to win, with just 13.5% of the vote.
The result is, in democratic terms, chaos. Nobody knows what impact their vote will have, or how it will translate into seats. Indeed, they are often told they cannot even vote for the party of their choice, for fear of “splitting” the vote, but rather must vote for some other party, to stop yet a third from getting in. All we know with certainty is that some votes count for less than others -- a lot less. When 2.6 million federal NDP votes equal 19 seats, as in 2006, but 1.6 million Bloc votes equal 51 seats, it means that each Bloc vote was worth more than four NDP votes.
Phoney majorities, barriers to competition, discrimination between voters -- that’s the case against the current system.
Excerpts below (emphases ours); full original text available at http://www.leg.bc.ca/HANSARD/38th5th/h90326p.htm
... Madam Speaker, I've spent four years here, so it seems to me I have the right and, I think, the responsibility to say some things about this Legislature and how it works — or doesn't work. If the people of the province actually spent some of their time watching us here, they'd be appalled. Every one of us knows that. It's not just that we heckle and yell at one another. It's much more fundamental than that.
They sent us here to govern, and we don't. Everybody who works here knows that the real governing takes place in the Premier's office with a few handpicked friends and advisers. That's not just this government. I'm not talking about just this government.
We here in this chamber are a kind of sideshow — an important sideshow but a sideshow nonetheless. We're part of the show that results in the choice of the next Premier in whose office the small group of advisers will again make the important decisions.
Who's winning question period? What's the tone in the Legislature? Who's made the best quips this week? Add those questions to the results of the latest polling and the opinions of a few pundits, and presto, we have what passes for politics in British Columbia. Rather than substance, this chamber is filled with sound and sometimes fury, but it signifies not very much.
The people sent us here to listen to one another, but we don't. They sent us here to negotiate with one another, but we don't. They sent us here, every one of us, to advise government, to take the debate seriously and to be taken seriously, but we don't. That's mostly because the debate hardly matters.
The people expect that when the opposition asks a simple, straightforward question, the government will give a straightforward answer. But that's not the way it works. Here again, I'm not talking about this government. I'm talking about the government of the day. Instead, we've created a system where the questions become the politics of question period, because there are never any answers. How pathetic.
But it's not enough to bemoan what is. What could we do to make it better? Here are a few modest suggestions. The Legislature should have a committee structure that matters. All-party committees should study and make recommendations on emergent and ongoing issues. Consensus decisions should be required, and recommendations should lead directly to draft legislation, and then you can vote how you want to vote.
Party discipline should be enforced only on matters of confidence and on proposed legislation that was committed to specifically as part of the platform of a party during the previous election.
Question period rules should require a specific answer to a specific question, and the Speaker should enforce these rules strictly. When the Minister of Education, for instance…. Here I don't mean to centre out the Minister of Education. It's just that education is my stuff. It's what I care about the most. When the Minister of Education answers a detailed question about cuts to education service to children — our children — with her irrelevant dirge that more money is being spent than ever, she does the province no favours.
She could say: "That's all the money we have" or "That's all the money we choose to spend, because there are other priorities" or "That's as much as we think is necessary." Any of those answers would generate a real debate about education, and that would be good for our province.
It will take a Premier and a government with real courage to make such a change, but until it happens, question period will continue to be a poor excuse for a reality TV show rather than an opportunity to improve our province.
Every MLA should be required to hold three or four town hall meetings in his or her constituency each year. These should be widely advertised and should be part of the budget allocation for constituency offices.
We should institute a form of mixed-member proportional representation so that every vote is meaningful and every significant point of view is represented.
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Original text at: http://thetyee.ca/News/2009/01/09/STV2009/
When University of Victoria political science professor Dennis Pilon this weekend addresses a Wosk Centre for Dialogue room full of people who want to change British Columbia's voting system, he'll advise them to spend at least as much time focussing on the problems with our current first-past-the-post system as they do selling the single-transferable vote (STV) alternative.
"That's really the greatest strength in this debate," said Pilon, who wrote The Politics of Voting: Reforming Canada's Electoral System. "Many people do not understand our current system, do not understand how it works. The more people understand how it works, the less they like it."
The system gives consistently strange results, he said, sometimes to the advantage of one party, sometimes to another. In 2001, for example, with 58 per cent of the B.C. popular vote, Gordon Campbell's Liberals won 77 out of 79, or about 97 per cent, of the seats in the legislature.
But in the previous election, in 1996, Campbell was himself the victim of electoral wonkiness when Glen Clark's NDP won a majority of seats in the legislature despite losing the popular vote. Campbell's party won 37,500 more votes than Clark's, but still had to spend five years hectoring from the opposition benches.
The system needs to be changed so it consistently reflects what voters want, he said. With a referendum planned on the question along with the general election in May, B.C. has an opportunity to make that change and Pilon will be doing what he can to help inform people what they are voting on.
"I think all political scientists are both observers and advocates, though they may not be that frank about it," he said. "We come to our advocacy by observing, looking at how different systems work and deciding which one we think is in the public interest... I have studied voting systems and I think if we want a representative democracy, this is a better choice. This will give people what they're asking for. That's my opinion."
The Tyee recently spoke with Pilon about the pros and cons of the old and the proposed systems, why he thinks a change is needed and how to separate the facts from the scaremongering in the coming debate.
"A lot of voters if you ask them will say they're unhappy with the way democracy works. They're unhappy with the way the parties are performing. They're frustrated with the kind of accountability they seem to be able to get under our current system. I do think STV will address some of those concerns."
"What people need to know is what kind of results might we expect from the different systems. We know the kind of results we'll get from the current system. People need to understand, and they don't understand, that a minority of voters often get a majority of the seats. Some people might think that's okay. A lot of people might be surprised to learn that. Our system is one that tends to produce majority governments. Some people like that. Some people think that's good. And that needs to be set out so people can say, 'Right, I like that, I'm going to vote for it.'
"Or we could have this other system. This other system, if we look at how it's been used in other countries, has also tended to produce fairly stable government. Has tended to produce more parties, a broader range of choices for voters and has tended to create a coalition dynamic for governments. The bottom line is both systems have produced governments that could get things done. The question is, do people like the opportunities these different systems offer."
Visit the Tyee for more on Pilon's answers to questions from the Tyee about both FPTP and BC-STV.