BC-STV, and why it’s annoying that [Darren P is] ineligible to vote for it – A Guest Posting
This was written by my friend, Darren P, as a Facebook note and I thought it was so well written and informative that I asked him if he would let me post it here as a guest posting. He graciously agreed and will now be dubbed my Kyoto Correspondent and Chief Fire Hydrant Advisor.
By Darren P.
On May 12, 2009, BC residents have the extremely rare opportunity to change their voting system. Not having lived in BC the last 6 months, I’m not eligible to vote, which is rather annoying given the importance of this referendum. But I can encourage others to vote. I wholeheartedly support BC-STV, and would be voting Yes.
Under the current system, each constituency in BC elects one MLA, whomever gets the most votes in that riding. Under the proposed system (overwhelmingly recommended by a randomly-selected group of ordinary citizens), constituencies would be pooled in groups of 2-7, and voters would have a preferential ballot, where they rank the candidates, and their vote or fractions of it are shifted to lower choices as their first choices are elected or eliminated.
The STV (single transferable vote) part, where you rank the candidates, means that you can vote for whomever you want, and strategic voting becomes secondary. If you support the Marxist-Leninist Party and the Christian Heritage Party, you can put them at the top of your list. If they aren’t elected, your vote isn’t wasted, it passes to your third choice. Is one party scary? Put them last. Hate that party but like one of their candidates? Rank that candidate higher, and increase the odds that they’ll get elected at the expense of some of their compatriots. You can vote for your true first choice, knowing that your vote will pass to other candidates if your first choice doesn’t get in, and you don’t have to worry about trying to block evil parties or candidates from getting elected by guessing who their best competitor is. It’s unlikely one party will sweep a multi-member constituency, so you can have some say over who represents each party in your riding. Note, though, that you only have one vote, so who’s 12th and 13th on your list is not particularly important if your second-place candidate wins (if they win in a landslide, a good fraction of your vote may be transferred). While ranking candidates is marginally more mentally challenging than marking a single X, the system’s really not so complicated. The vote counting is similarly a bit more involved, but not difficult to explain. I’ll get to that a bit later.
The best part, for me, is the multi-member constituencies. The larger a riding, the closer the results will be to proportional (this isn’t proportional, but it’s more proportional than the current system. At the size proposed, a good third party will pick up some seats, and most ridings will have both a government and an opposition MLA, so almost everyone will feel represented. Even better, multi-member constituencies are good for candidates and bad for parties. It doesn’t suffice to be a candidate for the most popular party, you need to be the most popular candidate for that party. This should weaken the parties, and improve the chances of well-known, well-respected, popular, and responsive MLAs. I grew up in a riding where one party could have run a tree stump and it would still have been elected. The actual candidate appeared to me to have skills and language ability closely resembling those of a tree stump, had done nothing in the community, and was content to be a trained seal, heckling from the last row, and voting blindly with the party rather than the constituents. I see no downside to having stronger, more independent MLAs.
It has been pointed out that large ridings will be hard for politicians to cover and hard to campaign in, and that it may not be clear who represents you. To the first concerns, well, I see no reason to make it easy on politicians, and I’d point out that federal ridings are already several times larger than provincial. As for who represents you, several people do. Go to the one who’s most responsive or in the best position to help. If one ignores you, return the favour when marking your next ballot. A particularly helpful MLA will get ranked higher, and the MLAs will usually realize this.
The large ridings will also lead to large ballots. You get that in city council elections, and you deal with it. Here, the candidates will be grouped by party for your convenience.
If the government decides to shovel money off the back of a truck only in ridings that supported them, they’ll find that they elected MLAs in all or almost all ridings. The large ridings also make it much more difficult to adjust a riding’s boundaries to benefit one party or another.
It has been pointed out that the proposed system is more likely to create coalition and minority governments. This is likely true, but not a large effect (as I mentioned, it’s not truly proportional). In other countries, this sort of government is the norm, and the parties have to co-operate. They know that people don’t want elections, and they know they’ll be punished if they’re seen to have triggered a needless election. Our vicious, polarizing politics would need to change, and it’s likely that the most partisan, unco-operative politicians would get booted out. In coalition or minority governments, parties have to prioritize, compromise, and try to bring each other on board if they want something passed. For something to become law, at least two parties have to be willing to go along with it. The compromises may well be hammered out behind closed doors, but that’s where legislation is made now, and this at least gets some different voices behind those closed doors.
Before getting into the gory details, because a good number of my friends will want to read that, but most won’t, a couple of final-ish thoughts:
First, this is a choice between BC-STV and the current system. Other systems are not on the ballot. If you believe BC-STV is an improvement, vote for it. There is no perfect voting system, and what you like is not what other people will like. If everyone holds out for perfection, nothing can ever improve. There are parts I would have done differently, mainly in the vote-counting, but I see BC-STV as a
significant improvement over the current system, and would be whole-heartedly voting for it if it were still legal for me to vote. Better is not the enemy of best, and you shouldn’t vote as if it is.
Second, it’s actually been proven that there is no perfect voting system. If you write down everything you want in a voting system, you’ll find parts of your list conflict. You can’t have true proportionality and still have constituencies — some constituency would have to elect unpopular candidates. Proportionality in the current system, for instance, would require about 10 constituencies to have Green MLAs, despite those candidates only getting a small fraction of the vote and finishing second, third or fourth. You might like the stability of a majority government, but that’s at odds with local representation (your representative should vote with you, not with the party) and a truly proportional system would almost never produce a majority. BC-STV strikes a balance, and I think it’s a pretty good
balance, all things considered.
Third, the voting is not complicated. Anyone can count to three or ten and express a preference. The vote-counting is a bit more complicated, but it’s not that bad. I’d like everyone to understand it, but I recognize that many won’t care. Once the voting system is in place, people will generally just trust other people to ensure that it’s done correctly. The candidates and parties will watch the counting, because they have a vested interest in ensuring that it’s done right. Recounts would still be done by hand by judges, and I expect there’d be recounts in almost every riding. So faith in the system will not be misplaced. People like me who are interested will know how it’s done in detail, but we’re a minority. Much as I’d like them to, the average person doesn’t need to know the full details behind the vote-counting any more than they need to know how their car’s airbag decides to inflate, how the 911 operator knows where their (landline) phone is, or how TCP/IP works in their internet connection. Knowing that the ranking is important and your vote or parts of it will pass to lower-ranked candidates as needed would suffice.
Now for the gory details:
Every voter gets one ballot and one vote, but they can express a preference for how that vote is transferred when each surviving candidate at the top of their list is elected or dumped.
There’s a quota of votes that a candidate needs in order to be elected. If V valid ballots were cast and there are N seats to fill, the quota is V/(N+1) plus one. If you check this with N=1 (the current system), you’ll see they’d need half of the votes (50%) plus one. If there are 5 seats to fill, a candidate would need 1/5 plus one.
First, every first choice is counted. This is identical to the current system so far, but now the quota is applied. If the first-place candidate has met the quota, they’re elected. If not, the last-place candidate is eliminated. If a candidate is eliminated, all of their votes pass to their voters’ second choices. If a candidate is elected, their excess votes (over and above the quota) are distributed to second-place choices. So, if a candidate got 10% more votes than the quota, everyone who voted for that candidate has 91% (100/110) of their vote count for the elected candidate, while 9% (10/110) passes to their
second choice.
At this point, the process repeats: If anyone’s met the quota, they’re elected and their excess votes are distributed. If not, the bottom candidates are dropped and their votes distributed until someone has met the quota. Unsurprisingly, the process ends when the correct number of MLAs have been elected, and ballots are dropped once they run out of ranked candidates.
You can make up your own mind, but please vote!
The Yes side‘s site
The No side‘s site
Some limited neutral information
BC Citizens’ Assembly
Comments |5|
Tags: BC, BC-STV, British Columbia, politics, proportional representation, single transferrable vote
Thanks to you AND Darren! That was very helpful. I already supported it but I really enjoyed the gory details! Now I might be able to explain it to others! 🙂
Glad you found it useful! Darren is the king of gory details!
Thanks for clarifying things a bit, Darren. I will most definately be voting NO for STV on this ballot. The entire notion that some people will have more voting power (those that fill in all their ‘vote spots’) then others (those who chose one candidate and one only), pretty much kills it for me full stop. One person, one vote must be sacrosanct. The notion that some people get ‘fallback’ candidates just feels wrong. Forcing someone to HAVE a ‘fallback’ candidate is just as bad.
The idea that my ‘1 vote’ can be exploded in to fractions, churned through some calculus-level computations, then assigned via the 4 winds to some other candidate (or candidates!) is, quite frankly, obscene. FPTP may not be the most flexible or ‘proportional’ or what have you…But there is something to be said for having an electorate of every intellect and educational level being able to understand EXACTLY where there vote is going when they scratch their mark on the ballot.
I disagree with the prospect of having to juggle the pros and cons of 15+ candidates every election. 3 or 4 is plenty. The only thing I see STV as being good for is to mitigate the ‘tree stump’ scenario you mentioned. But that is not enough to overthrow FPTP at this point.
Most voters will vote party first, because any other strategy has the potential of getting ‘the other’ party’s people in power. This is no different then the way things are now, just far more convoluted and voter-unfriendly.
Not saying the system cannot or should not be improved, but I don’t like how it’s been done with STV. Give us more options and let us vote on that. The either / or scenario of this election is wrong and needs to be approached in an entirely different way.
@Adrian: I can assure you there’s no calculus involved. Maybe some algebra, but no calculus. Your vote only goes where you want it to–it’s not like it gets kidnapped and given to someone you didn’t vote for.
If people want more voting power, they can totally have it–it’s not like BC-STV forces anyone to vote in any particular way. I guess that’s why its proponents go on and on about “choice.” 🙂
Voters will not need to worry about voting party first with BC-STV specifically because BC-STV prevents their vote from helping to elect “the other party’s people.” That’s the whole POINT, even. You can vote for independents and people who never had a snowball’s chance in hell of getting in (i.e. Greens) and then rank the more likely candidates of whatever major party a little lower on your ballot to prevent the other major parties’ people from getting in if your longshots don’t get elected.
I’m so sick to death of all the misinformation, half-truths, and outright lies spread by people against BC-STV. There are definitely some disadvantages to the system (as there are to any voting system)–I’m happy if people argue those. But all these veiled implications that you lose your vote, that it’s arcanely complex, and that somehow by adopting it people will end up helping to elect the very people they’d least like to see in office is disgusting. If you can figure out which flavours of ice cream you like and in which order, you can use BC-STV.
What he said.
Seriously, thanks Kalev, for the comment to clarify those points.
Adrian, the people who fill in all their vote spots won’t have more voting power than those who choose to vote for only one candidate. Everyone gets one vote – it may go all to one candidate, or it may go 1/2 a vote to one candidate and 1/2 a vote to another (or any number of possible combinations), but you will never get more than one vote. And, as Kalev points out, your vote can’t be “kidnapped and given to someone you didn’t vote for.” You say you are concerned that everyone should be “able to understand EXACTLY where there [sic] vote is going” – well, right now I know that my vote is going in the garbage. It doesn’t count at all because I don’t support the BC Liberals, but I live in a “safe” BC Liberal riding. I want my vote to count for the people that I vote for and not just to be thrown away like it is now.