An extra day to determine results puts credibility at risk because the tin foil hat brigade has time to comment after polls close? Nonsense.Chris Pook said:The longer the process then the greater the opportunity for speculation on how the final answer was determined: credibility.
Of course, FPTP is subject to gaming too. Also, you are presenting the false dichotomy that I referred to earlier. Your blanket label of "these systems" and reference to paralyzed legislatures under PR systems is an intellectually dishonest attempt to present everything that is not FPTP as PR. That is not the case.Thucydides said:Not to mention that these systems are subject to gaming and potential deadlocking. There have now been several governments in Europe where no one was able to assemble a clear majority or majority coalition, leaving the nation in the hands of a caretaker for periods of up to a year.
MCG said:For the NDP, Greens, and any other smaller party the desire to frame this debate in a false dichotomy is because only through proportional representation or large multi-representative constituencies will these parties see an increase in their share of Parliament's seats - these small parties would prefer we not look at other electoral reform options that retain our current single representative constituencies.
Coffee_psych said:What a great point! Now just cause I'm still super new to this topic. The main reason I know the Greens want equal voting is because 12%(ish) of voters go for them, translating to parliament, they could have 3000% the amount of seats. So is there another way of making voting more fair but retain the legitimacy of single representative constituencies?
Coffee_psych said:What a great point! Now just cause I'm still super new to this topic. The main reason I know the Greens want equal voting is because 12%(ish) of voters go for them, translating to parliament, they could have 3000% the amount of seats. So is there another way of making voting more fair but retain the legitimacy of single representative constituencies?
Bird_Gunner45 said:How do you define fair is the question. In some regards, 12% of the vote (3.4% in the last election actually) should = 12% of the seats. However, does that simple assessment equal actual fair representation? For example, the Bloc Quebecois received 19.4% of the vote in Quebec and obviously 0% outside of Quebec for a total of 4.7% of the total votes cast. Does fairness in this case equate to the BQ receiving 4.7 (5) seats in the house of commons of 19.4 (19)% of the total seats in Quebec?
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/politics/liberals-not-necessarily-advantaged-by-switch-to-ranked-ballot-system-experts/article31404531/Liberals not necessarily advantaged by switch to ranked ballot system: experts
Joan Bryden, The Canadian Press
Globe and Mail
15 Aug 16
If Justin Trudeau gets his way on electoral reform, will the Liberals “steal” every federal election in perpetuity?
As hearings on a new voting regime resume next Monday, the Conservatives contend that’s what would be in store if Canada adopts a system of ranked ballots, which the prime minister has in the past touted as his preference for replacing the current first-past-the-post (FPTP) voting system.
Pollsters, pundits and proponents of proportional representation are only slightly less apocalyptic, predicting that a ranked ballot system — also known as preferential ballot or alternative vote (AV) — would certainly give the centrist Liberals an unfair advantage.
Hogwash, say political scientists who specialize in the study of voting systems.
“Would the Liberals automatically benefit? No,” says Wilfrid Laurier University’s Brian Tanguay.
“You can’t say anything would automatically occur once a change in the electoral system happens ... The moment you change the rules of the game, the calculations of both the parties and the voters themselves will change.”
Assuming a Liberal advantage is “very much wrong-headed” and “far too simplistic,” agrees York University’s Dennis Pilon.
Under AV, voters mark their first, second and subsequent choices. If no candidate wins more than 50 per cent of the vote, the contender with the fewest votes is dropped from the ballot and his or her supporters’ second choices are counted. That continues until one candidate emerges with a majority.
Had that system been in place in last fall’s election, polls have suggested Trudeau’s Liberals — who won 55 per cent of the seats in the House of Commons with just 39 per cent of the popular vote — would have won an even bigger “false majority” since they were the most popular second choice among supporters of other parties.
Trouble is, those analyses superimpose second choice preferences onto voting behaviour that was driven by FPTP — which compelled plenty of New Democrat and Green supporters last October to back the Liberals to defeat the Conservatives, rather than risk “wasting” their votes on the smaller parties.
If those strategic voters had been able to support their first choices, marking the Liberals second as surety against Conservative victory, the result could have been much different, experts say. For one thing, NDP support likely wouldn’t have utterly collapsed.
“My best guess, without doing a close riding-by-riding assessment, is that a preferential ballot would likely have produced a hung Parliament rather than a Liberal majority,” says University of British Columbia professor emeritus Ken Carty.
But it’s not just voter behaviour that would have changed. The parties themselves would have been forced to broaden their appeal if they’d been competing for second — and not just first — choice votes.
If AV did wind up benefiting primarily the Liberals, Pilon says the Conservatives would have only themselves to blame.
“The Conservatives have pushed themselves into a corner that’s just too extreme for Canadians,” he says.
“One of the arguments for AV could be that maybe we’d end up with a less extreme Conservative party. First-past-the-post allows the Conservative party to be more extreme because they don’t have to win 50 per cent or near 50 per cent to win ridings.”
So, which party would benefit most under ranked balloting? Hard to say.
It would likely be an advantage for smaller parties that tend to get squeezed by strategic voting under FPTP, says Arend Lijphart, professor emeritus at the University of California San Diego and widely considered the world’s leading expert on voting systems.
Like other experts interviewed by The Canadian Press, Lijphart is a fan of proportional representation, a voting system in which a party’s share of seats in the legislature reflects its share of the popular vote. But, while ranked balloting would not produce a proportional distribution of seats, he says it would still be better than FPTP.
“I think you get a more accurate choice with ranked choice balloting and you’re really also making it easier and more straight-forward for the voter because the voter doesn’t have to calculate how is my vote going to work. They can vote the way they feel.”
The beneficiary of such voter liberation would likely vary from region to region of the country, says Pilon. In some places, like the Greater Toronto Area where voters tend to switch between the Liberals and Conservatives, the two main parties would benefit. In places like B.C., where voters are more likely to switch between NDP and Conservative, those two parties would benefit.
In the handful of countries that use ranked ballots, like Australia, Pilon says the system was introduced deliberately to allow two main parties to work together to shut out other parties — and it’s largely worked out that way. But that hasn’t been the experience in Canada, where the system was used provincially years ago.
Back in the early 1950s, when B.C. was governed by a Liberal-Conservative coalition, Tanguay says those two parties brought in ranked ballots to “keep the socialist hordes out.”
They assumed “Conservatives’ second choice would be Liberal and Liberals’ second choice would be Conservative and one of them would get into power and keep the CCF (forerunner to the NDP) at bay.”
But those assumptions were “shattered” when Social Credit “came out of nowhere” to score the most second-choice votes and win the election.
And that, says Tanguay, underscores the unpredictability of what could happen if ranked balloting were adopted nationally.
http://news.nationalpost.com/full-comment/andrew-coyne-no-proportional-representation-would-not-turn-canada-into-a-dystopian-hellholeNo, proportional representation would not turn Canada into a dystopian hellhole
Andrew Coyne
National Post
August 18, 2016 1:26
Here is how some opponents of proportional representation think it works. After the votes are cast, each party receives a number of seats in strict accordance with its share of the total vote. Rather than running in constituencies, MPs are simply pulled off lists drafted by party leaders.
The parliament that results is a fragmented mess: dozens of parties, many of them of a fringe or extremist hue. Unable to command a majority on their own, mainstream parties are forced to negotiate with the fringe parties for power. The upshot: chaos, instability and, as often as not, financial ruin.
You’d be surprised how many otherwise well-informed people believe this. Here, for example, is Bill Tieleman, B.C. NDP strategist, writing in The Tyee: “How would you like an anti-immigrant, racist, anti-abortion or fundamentalist religious political party holding the balance of power in Canada? … Welcome to the proportional representation electoral system, where extreme, minority and just plain bizarre views get to rule the roost.”
At the other ideological pole, here’s columnist Lorne Gunter, writing in The Sun newspapers: “PR breaks the local bond between constituents and MPs … In a strict PR system, party leaders at national headquarters select who their candidates will be, or at least in what order they will make it into Parliament …”
The question naturally arises: where are these dystopian hellholes? Is that really how proportional representation works, either in operation or result? Why, then, would anyone choose it?
Because the system described above does not remotely resemble proportional representation as it is practised in most countries at most times. Look at any list of the world’s most successful countries, by whatever metric you prefer — GDP per capita, say, or median incomes, or triple-A credit ratings, or if you find those too limiting, the UN’s Human Development Index — and you find the same names appearing.
Yes, you’ll see the United Kingdom, the United States and Canada, all using the familiar “first past the post” system. But so, near the top of every list, are: Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, Germany, Iceland, Ireland, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden and Switzerland, all of whose parliaments are wholly or partially elected by proportional representation.
Whether this is because of or in spite of their political system is another question. But we can at least describe accurately how their political system actually works, rather than rely on caricatures born of half-remembered newspaper clippings.
How many parties, for starters, does one find in the typical PR-based legislature? There’s a range, depending (in part) on the size of the electoral districts from which they are elected. Remember: what distinguishes PR is the use of multi-member, rather than single-member, districts. The more members per district, the more closely you can match the number of seats a party gets to its proportion of the vote.
So at one end, you have countries such as Austria, Finland, Iceland, Ireland, Luxembourg and Sweden, all with six to eight parties represented in their legislatures — or about one to three more than Canada’s, with five. At the other, Belgium, Denmark, the Netherlands and Switzerland, with 10 to 12.
Virtually all of these countries have some element of local representation: only the Netherlands, whose total area is less than that of some Canadian ridings, elects MPs at large. And none uses the “strict” form of PR Gunter describes, known as “closed list.” Rather, voters can generally choose which of a party’s candidates they prefer, so-called “open lists.”
How unstable are these systems? Since 1945, Canada has held 22 elections. In only one of the PR countries mentioned has there been more: Denmark, with 26. The average is 20. It is true that the governments that result are rarely, if ever, one-party majorities. But, as you may have noticed, that is not unknown here. Nine of Canada’s 22 federal elections since 1945 have resulted in minority parliaments.
Is there occasional post-election wrangling, while parties negotiate on the makeup of the coalition governments? Yes. But the notion that this inevitably makes the large parties hostage to the fringe is contrary to both logic and fact. The larger parties may agree to govern together, as Austria’s Social Democratic party and Austrian People’s party did in 2003, rather than accept the right-wing Austrian Freedom party as a partner. Or if they do decide to deal, they must be mindful of the voters’ wrath at the next election, as New Zealand’s National party discovered in 1999, after it was judged to have sold its soul to the anti-immigrant New Zealand First party.
So where did the caricature come from? Two words: Israel and Italy. Even here the picture is exaggerated: the Israeli parliament has 12 parties, Italy’s eight. By comparison, France, which uses a two-round system, has 14, while the United Kingdom — yes, Mother Britain — now has 11. More to the point, there are circumstances unique to each, not only in their parliamentary systems — Israel uses an extreme form of PR, while Italy’s, which has gone through several, defies description — but in their histories and political cultures.
To be sure, the world is full of people, and parties, with unsettling views. But it’s too simple to ascribe these to particular electoral systems. Just now, the gravest extremist uprisings are to be found in the United States and the United Kingdom, where they threaten to devour the Republican and Labour parties, respectively.
Or as it has been said: if Israel and Italy are enough to make the case against PR, then we should as well avoid first past the post, as that’s the system in Zimbabwe.
Oldgateboatdriver said:In a PR system, since many parties have fairly a solid minimum percentage of vote as starting point, the core group of politician these party choose becomes entrenched and near impossible to remove, even if the public would love nothing more than trounce them.
Brad Sallows said:Ditto. PR should not even be on any list of options.
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2) Further weakens independents and strengthens parties, which leads to...
3) ...further consolidation/centralization at the core of party power, militating against other attempted reforms intended to oppose the trend toward centralization.
4) Nothing prevents parties from filling party lists with duds who can't get elected in a riding but are thought by the party to be deserving of patronage.
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Dolphin_Hunter said:I think mixed PR is the way to go. You'd still have FPTP, then so many seats would be allocated to PR. New Zealand uses this model.
You'd vote for your chosen politician, then you'd vote for the party. So everyone would still get to vote who represents their riding, however the boundaries would have to be redrawn. A certain percentage of seats would be set aside for PR, those would be filled from the party list.