British Columbia is holding a referendum on May 12. Voters will be asked whether they would rather use the current winner-take-all system, or single transferable vote. See the web page of the British Columbia Elections Office here. Thanks to Thomas Jones for this link.
It’s irritating that their ballot uses the phrase “first-past-the-post”, which is a bizarre and misleading metaphor. In plurality elections, there is no “post”!
Ah, someone trying to make sense of the English language!
The post stuff is from British horse racing — first past the post (on a race course) wins — a horse or a party hack with a plurality in a gerrymander district race.
Minority rule gerrymanders from England/ U.K. infected Canada, the U.S.A. and other former British regimes.
STV is around 90-95 percent accurate — NOT good enough.
REAL Democracy NOW
Total Votes / Total Seats = EQUAL votes needed for each seat winner — via pre-election candidate rank order lists to tranfer surplus and loser votes.
This proposal won 58% in 2004, carrying 77 of the province’s 79 provinces, but it needed 60% to win. It has a real shot.
Rob, yeah, it won 77 out of 79 provinces.
The interesting feature of this referendum is that the government had the boundary commission draw up the district boundaries that would be used if STV is approved.
The election will also be held concurrently with a general election for the provincial Legislative Assembly using 83 single-member districts (aka “provinces”).
So voters will be able to see the districts that they would be voting in under STV (some interior districts are quite large).
And opponents may provide hypothetical sample ballots. So if you are in seven-member district, you might be shown a ballot with 30 or so candidates (simply by merging all the candidate lists). If the proponents argue that the parties might not file as many candidates, point out that a voter might lose the opportunity to vote for a SoCred MLA from his community.
Good catch, Derek… ! I meant 77 of the province’s 79 districts.
Jim’s right that the provincial leaders are trying some new tricks to keep the no vote over 40%. We’ll see if they can succeed.
#7 Why shouldn’t voters know that if the system is approved, what the size of the districts will be, or the length of the ballot they may face, or that some candidates will only need 1/8 of the vote, while others will need 1/3 to be elected.