The Special Committee on Electoral Reform has been defined and we couldn’t be happier. All the criteria point clearly to a Ranked or Preferential Voting system and practically rule out a number of others. Here are the official criteria: (a) Effectiveness and legitimacy: that the proposed measure would increase public confidence among Canadians that their democratic will, as expressed by…
Ontario opens the way to ranked ballots
The province of Ontario is introducing the option of using ranked ballots in municipal elections. Congratulations, Ontario, great move! We support the use of ranked ballots to elect a mayor and a municipal councillor. Too often these positions are won with a plurality of far less than 50% of the votes. The more unpopular a candidate, the greater the number…
The Front National and electoral systems
The French regional elections of December 2015 demonstrate quite dramatically the main danger of our plurality voting system, and its solution. Taking advantage of the anger of the French and of the low turnout in regional elections, the far-right Front National party managed to place first in several regions with 30-40% of votes in the first ballot where only 48%…
Federal Election Demonstrates the Need for Preferential Voting
The October 19th 2015 election, with a large part of the electorate relying on strategic voting to achieve what they wanted their vote to achieve, was a dramatic demonstration of the advantage of preferential voting. In this election, for a lot of voters the focus was squarely on what they could do to influence their own local race, not on…
Less of What You Don’t Like
Sometimes a vote for an MP is motivated mostly by the party that the candidate belongs to, sometimes it is mostly the individual, or a combination, but often a major motivation is ensuring that one particular candidate does not win. Each motivation for voting is legitimate, don’t let anyone tell you that you are voting incorrectly. So how easy is…
The benefits of single-member constituencies
Do you know who is your MP in Ottawa, the person whose job it is to represent you? The odds are that you do. Wherever you live, there is one person who is your representative, and is accountable to you. Do you know who represents you in the Senate? Unless you live in Yukon, NWT, Nunavut, or Quebec, the answer…
Giving MPs a Strong Personal Mandate
There is a lot of debate about how often MPs should vote differently from their party leader in Parliament. There are many free votes, where party leaders officially give permission for MPs to vote the way they think is right, and some MPs sometimes do it even without permission. But most of what MPs do is things other than voting.…
Ranked ballots for more conciliatory politics
In the current voting system, and in fact in most voting systems, negative politics and attack ads are effective strategies. You can be as nasty and divisive as you like and attack your opponents. You don’t need to care about alienating the people who support your opponents: as long as your core supporters vote for you and there are more…
What is a majority?
Under the current voting system, do you need a majority of votes to be elected MP? That’s the wrong question to ask. Why? Because it’s ambiguous. The word majority has two different senses. If you look in an American dictionary, it will tell you a majority of votes is a number or percentage equaling more than half of a total. But…
Ranked Ballots Avoid the Vote Splitting Strategy
One of the ways in which plurality voting (sometimes called first-past-the-post) can fail to capture the preferences of voters is through “vote splitting.” Vote splitting means that two candidates who are liked equally by a majority of voters, or where voters like both better than the other candidates are less likely to be elected than a candidate who is disliked…