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the methods of election

The American Fair Vote organisation says this about at-large;

With at-large systems, all voters can vote for all seats up for election (i.e. when electing five representatives, voters can vote for five candidates). Depending on the system, all candidates may run against one another, with the highest vote getters winning election, or candidates may run for individual, designated seats. In some cases, runoffs will be used to ensure that all winners have majority support, while in others it is possible to win with a simple plurality. At-large systems are used to elect city councils in Cincinnati, Detroit and Seattle, as well as many other municipal and county governments. Other bodies, including the Maryland Statehouse, divide land up into multi-member districts, from which representatives are elected at large.

At-large systems allow 50 percent of voters to control 100 percent of seats, and in consequence typically result in racially and politically homogenous elected bodies. From this perspective, they are even worse than district systems, where it is possible to draw individual districts where political, racial or ethnic minority groups can control individual seats. At-large systems have frequently been struck down under the Voting Rights Act for not providing communities of color with fair representation.

winner take all

This is what we have now in Canada. It is often called "first past the post" as in a horse race, not really a good analogy. Even if only a fraction of the voters voted for a candidate, if he or she has one more vote than the next candidate, he/she has won. It works when there are only two candidates. The more credible candidates are in the running, the more ridiculous it gets.

Single transferable Vote (STV) is really a bad name for this method. It refers to the exact method of counting the votes. The voters rank the candidates in order of preference. Then a "quota" is calculated; the number of votes cast divided by the number of seats to be filled plus one. Then the first choice votes are added. If any candidate has made the quota, he is in. Then the lower ranked candidates are dropped, but the next choices of those who voted for them still count. Then the second choice votes are added to the first choice. This continues until enough candidates have made the quota.

It has occasionally happened that they run out of candidates and still have seats to fill.

There is a slightly different method of counting votes, in which the votes of the lowest candidate are not transfered. This is called, of course, single non transferable vote; SNTV.

Two countries, Ireland and Malta, use STV for national elections. Australia uses it for their senate elections. All these are island nations with a history of British rule. Ireland has used it for eighty years. It is criticized there as leading to localism and cronyism. The contrary is that this is a result of the Irish culture, not the voting system. But STV has not spread far beyond Ireland in eighty years. In Canada, the B.C. citizen's assembly recommended it.

There is much more record of STV in local politics. It was used in big cities in the United States, and some in Canada, during the early part of the century. It is credited with ending the corrupt political machines in many cities. But it seems to have disapeared, and some say that is because it also led to election of candidates the elite considered undesireable, such as communists and negros. When a negro communist got elected in New York, that was the last straw.

Under STV, counting the vote gets very unwieldly when the number of representatives for a district gets large. It is a good thing computers were invented to do this, or it would take days to do the counting. But with computers, there is more possibility of vote-rigging.

STV is a very good alternative to the "at large" system when something like a city council is to be elected to speak for the whole area. This is often desired as a way of getting rid of narrow minded localism; representatives who are focussed solely on their own wards, not on the well being of a city or district as a whole.

Trying to fill a provincial or national legislature would be horribly complicated if multiple districts were not used. The districts do not all have to be the same size, but they must have roughly the same ratio of representatives to population. The multi-member districts can conform to geographical areas or to local political divisions.

Some times under STV, districts have as few as two members. This is often though to leave smaller parties out, and limit choice for the voters. In the B.C. proposal, a few remote and sparsely populated areas continued as single member districts.

preference voting

The aim of preference voting is to insure that the candidate elected was supported by a majority of the voters. Of course, it only makes sense if you are electing a single person, such as a single district representative, a mayor, a reeve, a president, etc.

The crudest kind of runoff vote is to have a second election between the top two finishers, if neither of them have a majority. A more sophisticated idea is the instant runoff, which is on the way to a cumulative vote. The voters mark their second choices, and they are counted on election night if nobody has a majority.

Cumulative is when the voters rank all the candidates in order, and second, third, etc choices are added up, with the bottom candidate dropped off, until somebody has a majority. Brainiacs do not like this definition but they have trouble coming up with a better term to explain what it is.

PR is essentially the idea that the party, not the individual candidate, is what matters. Most people are aligned with PR whether they are aware of it or not, because most people vote for a party, not a candidate. People generally do not like politicians and do not know the name of their political representative. This is not because of apathy, but because they generally have no reason to want to know. They would much rather vote for a philosophy of government as represented by a party. They would much prefer that their legislatures and councils got along with each other and made decisions by consensus, and dispensed with all the ego driven posturing and maneuvering.

The vast majority of democracies in the world now use PR. Everwhelmingly, when people emerge from a long period of tyranny and can decide on a method of electing their legislators, and have few preconceptions about democracy, and can look at what options are available, they choose PR.

PR is defined as a system in which the number of seats a political party has in the assembly is proportional to the number of votes it got. It does not need to be more complicated than that.

Besides consensus government, the big advantage to PR is that it sharply reduces opportunity for influence peddling by putting legislators under party discipline.

Mixed Member Proportional is what the Ontario citizen's assembly recommended to Ontario voters in 2008. It is a compromise between our present system and straight proportionality. Some seats are still single member districts, and others are alloted proportionally, by party lists. This is why it is so popular with counties which are trying to move from a single member district system to proportionality. It partially mollifies people who are hung up on the idea of having their 'own' representative, but it also guarantees that most people will actually have a representative from the party of their choice. Recently New Zealand, Wales, and Scotland have adopted it.

The first big problem with it is that it creates, in some people's eyes, two classes of representatives. The second is what is called 'overhang', where there are not enough 'list' seats, seats filled from party lists, to keep the seat numbers proportional to the vote numbers. The usual remedy for this is to create some aditional seats for just that term.

The advantage is that it creates coalition governements, not elective dictatorships, which is the point of PR. Canadians are coming to like minority government, where no one party can do whatever it likes for five years, while other parties scheme to replace it at the public trough.

In some mixed member systems, the voter casts a single vote for the chosen candidate in the district and the candidate's party. A party's seat total is calculated from its total vote, which is calculated rom the combined votes of its candidates. This makes independant candidates nearly impossible.

In this type of mixed member system, the voter casts two votes; one for a candidate in his district, and one for the party of her choice. Only the second vote goes to determine the party's seat totals. This makes it easier for independant candidates. This is what the Ontario citizen's assembly recommended in 2007.

This is where all members of a legislative council or assembly are chosen by proportional representation. If there are 100 seats, and a party gets ten percent of the vote, it gets ten seats. The first ten names off its slate of candidates are elected.

Much nonsense is said about how this allows 'party hacks' to decide who the members will be. Of course, this is a much worse problem with single member districts, where each candidate has to campaign individually for nomination. There are always political hacks, but any form of PR will limit their opportunity to assert influence as compared to single districts. This is simply because there are many more ways of getting things done with a PR system. If a constituent is not getting anywhere with one representative, he or she has several other representatives, from several parties, who are willing to help. If a small clique is in control of a party, it is much easier for its members to get rid of them, or just form a new party. The whole point of PR is that it forces people to work with each other, instead of just obstructing everyone who is not them.

As for choosing party lists, most PR countries leave that up to the party. Parties which do not choose a democratic way of making up their lists may find themselves without voters in the next election, as it is so much easier to get a new political party started in PR, and the voters have more choice

The lower the 'threshold' is set, the easier it is for new parties and small parties to be viable. The threshold means the percentage of seats a party has to win in order to get any seats at all. In some places it is 5%, in some places it is 3%, and some places have no threshold; if a party has enough votes to get a seat, then it has a seat. The rationale for this is that it keeps 'extreme' parties out. But who decides what is 'extreme' and 'fringe'? What are considered fringe parties in Canada, such as the Marxists or the Canada Action Party, do not get enough votes that they would get a seat under PR anyway. Thresholds are unfair to parties which are small but who have enough support to merit a seat.

As for independant candidates, contrary to assumptions they are possible with PR. Not too many people are really concerned about independant candidates, but some people have registered themselves as a political party with a slate of one, themselves, and gotten elected.

This is when the whole area from which the legislature or council is elected, is treated as one big district in a PR vote. Holland is a good example of such a system. One big advantage is that it finally eliminates all possibility of slanting elections by fiddling with the district boundaries.

This is where the area from which the legislature or council is to be elected is divided into several multi member districts. There is no reason for all the districts to be the same size, as long as a rough proportion between the population and the number of representatives is kept. Elections are less cumbersome this way, because lists or 'slates' do not have to be so large. Candidates do not have to campaign over so wide an area.

Multi member district boundaries can better conform to the geographic facts on the ground. Coherent communities do not have to be divided between voting districts. Larger districts with more representatives give a beter proportionality than smaller ones, and are fairer to smaller parties. This means they give the constituents more choice of representatives.

A closed list is where the voters can choose the slate of candidates a party presents them with on election day, or vote for another party. In most countries where PR is in use, each party devises its own democratic way for its members to choose the list. There are no party bigshots making up the lists at closed meetings. That is in winner take all systems, where the candidates are decided by riding executives, who are then often overidden by party chiefs.

An open list is where, in addition to choosing the party they want, the voters can rank the party's candidates in order of preference. The result varied from country to country which uses this. In some, voters rarely vary the order of the list. In other countries, they do it often. An open list system is a good way to counter the false criticism that party hacks are deciding who gets elected.

The point of this table is to explain in terms people can understand, everything they need to know about the various voting systems. It is not all that complicated. There is nothing new about them; people have discovered and rediscovered these methods all down history.

A problem with promoting voting reform is all the brainiacs who want to split hairs about the exact definitions of different kinds of systems and systems within systems. They keep coming up with definitions which do not describe. These people get in the way of actually getting voting reform; they alienate people.

There two important points to consider when thinking about what voting system will work in a community, borough, city, county, province, or country.

One is that there is a proper, democratic way of deciding voting reform and implementing it. It is not for some clique of know-it-alls to decide what is best for everyone else and to try to get the government to implement it. Likewise, legislators and councillors are in a conflict of interest when they try to decide among themselves what the voting rules will be.

We had the right process in British Columbia and Ontario, but governmental and media interests would not let it work. We had a citizen's assembly convene, study voting systems, and recommend changes. They had the option of recommending no change. This was a group of people taken from the voters lists, the same way in which juries are selected.

Then it was put to a referendum. But then all information about what the citizen's assembly was, what it recommended, and why, was suppressed and people's heads filled with misinformation. At the very least, adequate funding should have been available to groups wanting to mount a 'yes' campaign. And the referendum should not have been held concurrently with a general election.

The other important point is that representative government is not real democracy. It is at best a limited democracy. There is a well worn saying that;" the biggest threat to democracy is the idea that we already have it". What we have now is the product of centuries of struggle, but the process is far from finished.

Preference/proportional systems are not just one type of system equal to winner take all and others; they are evolutions from, and steps up from, winner takes all systems. The next step is being taken in many parts of the world; to direct democracy. That is, government by assemblies of all the citizens, or by citizens randomly chosen to decide specific issues, with more use of referenda.

But the key to direct democracy is consensus, rather than 'majority rules', and a pyramid of higher councils appointed by lower councils, at the base of which are local assemblies of all citizens. The principle is that every delegate is chosen by people who know them personally, and to whom they must report back. This type of structure seems innate in human nature; any time people are left alone to work out their own systems free from manipulation, they come up with something like this.

The point of this presentation is to explain to people what the different voting systems are; what has been tried and proven elsewhere. This will help people to select something higher than the winner -take-all system we have now. We will likely have to get to that level before we can go on to direct democracy.

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