Electoral Reform

Electoral Reform

We desperately need electoral reform in this country.  Canada, along with the United States and Great Britain, cling to an antiquated voting method that is heavily influenced by large companies and the rich, and is designed to concentrate power in a few people.  The only reason Canadian politics has not yet degenerated to the dysfunctional state of American politics is because we have more than two significantly sized political parties.  But without electoral reform this is where we are headed.  Here in Ontario a Progressive Conservative government was elected  (2022) with two thirds of the seats in the legislature, but only 40% of the popular vote.  They have all the power, but 60% of people did not choose them.  What is more, voter turnout was a paltry 43% of eligible voters.  That is at least partly because our system of voting renders many people's ballots completely impotent.  If you are a Green supporter in a riding that mostly supports a Liberal candidate, or a PC supporter in a riding that always goes NDP, what motivation do you have to vote?  Your vote means nothing.

There are better ways of selecting representatives, and most democracies in the world use such methods in their elections.  Some of the best methods are those that deliver proportional representation.  Such systems are designed to yield a legislature that is comprised of a reasonable representation of the preferences of all voters.  For a non-partisan explanation of proportional representation, check out the Fair Vote Canada website.

My suggested electoral system

There are many different voting systems that are considered proportional, and any one of them would be a vast improvement over our current First Past the Post (FPTP) system of elections.  Below is a description of my preferred method; I call it "Personal Mandate Proportional" (PMP).  It is similar to a Mixed Member Proportional (MMP) system,  but what distinguishes PMP from most MMP systems (for example the one used in New Zealand) is that it does not use FPTP in any manner, all elected members serve to represent constituencies, and it requires all elected representatives to personally achieve a significant mandate from voters.  The system works as follows.

• Each voter casts two ballots.  On the first ballot, the voter specifies their ranked order preference for the local representative.  On the second ballot, the voter specifies the one party they wish to form the government.

• An initial representative for each local constituency is selected from the ranked ballots via a tournament where each candidate goes head-to-head in a contest with each other.
  - In the contest between candidates A and B, if a ballot ranks A above B, then A gets one goal, else B does.  Counting all ballots, the winner of the contest is the candidate with the most goals.  The winning candidate gets one point.  (Ties are very unlikely given the number of ballots, but in that case each candidate gets half a point.)
  - After playing all contests, the candidate with the most points wins.  Here point ties between two ore more candidates are likely to occur some of the time.  Ties are broken as follows.  First consider only the contests between the candidates who tied with the most points.  If counting the points from this subset of contests still results in a tie between two or more candidates, the remaining tied candidate with the most first place rankings on the ballots is declared the winner.

• The second ballot, the "party" vote, will dictate the fraction of the legislature occupied by members from each party.  If a party reaches a specified threshold (for example, has at least one local representative elected by the process above, or receives at least 5% of the party vote) they are entitled to their party vote fraction of the seats in the legislature.  If they happen to have already elected more local representatives than their party vote entitlement, then they are awarded no further seats.  However, if they have elected less local representatives than their party vote entitlement, then they are awarded additional seats.  Additional seats are awarded to parties one at a time, always to the party currently furthest below its entitlement, until the total number of seats in the legislature is full.  How are people chosen to fill these additional seats?  This is where my system differs from most MMP systems in use.  I believe that no individual person should have a seat in the legislature without having a significant personal mandate, that is, they must themselves have been a high preference of many voters.  Therefore, the candidates who did not win but performed the best in the initial selection of local representatives are chosen to fill the extra seats.  So, for example, if the legislature had 70 seats corresponding to constituencies and 30 additional seats to total 100, and if the Green party got 7% of the party vote but only elected 2 local representatives by the initial process, then they would be entitled to 5 additional seats.  All of the (losing) Green candidates who ran in local areas would be compared with each other and the top 5 who have not already been elected would be selected.  The easiest way to compare them would be to look at the fraction of first place rankings that they each received in their local area, but other comparison methods are also possible.  Regardless of exactly how they are selected, the members filling the additional seats would still be considered local representatives for the constituency in which they ran.  It just means that some constituencies will have more than one representative.
  
  

Do you see how this system gives meaning to every ballot?  At the local level, the ranked ballot allows voters to provide their preference list; they are not restricted to voting for just one candidate.  Strategic voting, whereby a voter holds their nose and votes for candidate B rather than their preferred candidate C just because they are afraid that if they do not then candidate A will win, is nearly eliminated by this use of a ranked ballot.  A voter such as the one described above would simply rank C then B then A on their ballot.  The fact that there are two ballots allows a voter to distinguish between their local representative and their preferred party.  They could rank the candidate from the party they selected on their second ballot as last on their ranked ballot, if they chose to do so.  And the second ballot for every voter always (unless they select a party that does not reach the threshold) directly influences the final proportions of the parties in the legislature.

DETAILS and MODIFICATIONS:

There are many details to the system described above that could be altered.  

• One important detail is the number of constituencies and the number of additional seats in the legislature.  The more additional seats, the more proportional is the result; but fewer constituencies means they are larger.  

• Another detail is the threshold a party must reach on their party vote in order to be entitled to their share in the legislature; 5% seems reasonable but other values could be used.  

• One could also use different scoring schemes in the initial selection of local representative from the ranked ballots, for example a Kemeny-Young method of scoring or an Instant Run-off Voting (IRV) method rather than the tournament system described above.  If one used an IRV method, then comparing candidates from the same party across constituencies to determine who fills the additional seats could be done by comparing the percentage of votes for the candidate in the round they were eliminated.  This would arguably be a better way of comparing personal mandates within a party than simply the number of first place rankings.  More sophisticated methods of comparing within a party could also be derived from the Kemeny-Young method.

• The requirement that all candidates have a significant personal mandate removes potential problems arising after the election in the case that a candidate, chosen for an additional seat based on their party affiliation, either resigns from their party or is kicked out of their party.  Allowing them to maintain their seat in this case  is reasonable since they have a personal mandate to be there.  Otherwise rules need to be established to decide what happens when a person, elected to an additional seat based on their party, either resigns from their party or is kicked out.  

• Although some people get selected in the initial round and others due to the party vote, all members are considered local representatives; there is not a "mixed" set of members.  Some constituencies will happen to have two or possibly more representatives who share the constituency work and any monetary support that comes for that.  Which constituencies end up with more than one representative will change each election, so there is no inherent unfairness doing this.  Further, it then both requires all legislative members to engage in constituency work and allows them to benefit from it, so it is fair in that sense.  If one wished, one could limit the number of elected people from any one constituency, it would just mean that someone from that party with a little less personal support in a different constituency would be chosen instead.

Regardless of the details, any proportional system will serve the needs of Canadians much better than our current FPTP.

Demand electoral reform!  Demand proportional representation!

Allan R. Willms, 2022

Rebuttal of the Toronto Star 2022-06-25 Article "The Saturday Debate: It is finally time for electoral reform in Ontario?" 

On June 25, 2022, the Toronto Star published "The Saturday Debate: It is finally time for electoral reform in Ontario?" In that article, Lydia Miljan argued for the "No" side.  Below is a rebuttal of her arguments.

Lydia's third argument is that electoral reform cannot truly provide a majority opinion.  Here she is conflating the process of selecting a winner for an individual riding and the idea of proportional representation (PR), which is about producing a representative set of elected officials.  For an individual riding electing one member, most of the time there will never be a majority winning candidate regardless of the system you use, simply because most ridings have more than two candidates who garner substantial support.  She cites the fact that if you use a ranked ballot, where voters provide a ranking of all candidates, that sometimes their second or third choice wins.  Of course.  Under our current first-past-the-post (FPTP) system the person you vote for either wins or loses.  Under a system that uses a ranked ballot, sometimes the person you ranked first will win, sometimes your second rank will win and so on.  How could it be any other way?  I think what she is complaining about is that under a ranked ballot system it is possible that a person with a plurality (more than any other but not a majority) of first place rankings may not be the winner.  Yes, that is true.  It is the point of a ranked ballot.  Unlike the current system, where the only information we gather from voters is their top choice, the use of a ranked ballot allows the voter to convey more information; precisely, it allows them to say what their second and third, etc. choices are.  Although it depends significantly on the electoral system used to select winners from the ranked ballots, such systems try to use the information gathered to select a winner that pleases the most people by some quantitative measure.  Our FPTP system is woefully bad at pleasing the majority of voters.  For example, everyone agrees that if a majority of the electorate favours one candidate then the electoral system should select that candidate as a winner.  Conversely, if a majority of the electorate wants one candidate to lose then the electoral system ought to ensure that candidate does not win.  Yet FPTP regularly fails in this regard.  Reasonable systems using a ranked ballot do not allow this to happen.  Collecting and using more data from voters about their opinions is bound to yield results that are more satisfactory to the populace overall.  But proportional representation is not primarily about how one selects winners for individual ridings; it is about providing a parliament that is representative of the peoples' diverse opinions.

Lydia's fourth argument is that PR systems give areas with high population densities more say in the outcome of elections and that this marginalizes rural voters.  The first part of this statement is true for both PR systems and the first-past-the-post (FPTP) system in use now.  Both give areas with higher density more say, because we as a society believe that representation ought to be based on population not on geographic area.  The second part of the statement, that PR marginalizes rural voters any more than the current system is hard to justify.  The kind of PR system that Lydia is talking about here is one that gives every person a chance to indicate their preferred governing party.  This is the same for rural and urban voters, and gives each voter a say that counts even if the riding they live in elects a local representative of whom they do not approve.  Based on this, it seems that if anything, PR will reduce rural marginalization.

Lydia then makes a classic "look how big this is" feint to try to draw attention away from the even more remarkable opposite.  She points out that 34 ridings in the last election were won by candidates receiving a majority of the votes.  What she failed to point out was that 90 ridings were won by candidates who failed to obtain a majority of the votes.

Lydia's next argument is complete nonsense.  She argues that with PR systems there are more parties that will be able to win seats and therefore parties do not have an incentive before the vote to compromise to differing points of view within the party.  What?  Does she think that with, say 8 political parties able to win at least one seat that we have covered all points of view on any topic?  I can sit down with 20 colleagues at my work place and we can easily come up with 20 differing points of view on just about any subject of importance.  There will be no shortage of a need to compromise within a party just because a few other parties happen to be able to win seats.  What is more, with PR, the parties are required not only to compromise within, but also across party lines.  PR systems generally produce minority parliaments, precisely because the population generally does not give majority support to one party.  What Lydia disparagingly calls "backroom deals after the election" that bypass voters wishes in the process of forming government is in reality discussions and compromise to create a government that adequately reflects the diverse points of view that the voters have expressed.

Finally, Lydia points out that all of the parties except the Greens were unable to increase their number of votes compared to the last election.  Her argument is that the decline in voter turnout was because the parties failed to connect with the population.  I cannot argue against that conclusion, but I point out that if you are a PC supporter in a riding that almost always votes NDP, or a liberal supporter in a riding that almost always votes PC, or a Green supporter in almost any riding, then it is hard to be motivated to vote when you know that your vote will have absolutely no outcome on the election.  That the Greens were able to increase their support in these circumstances indicates that their message is resonating strongly with at least some voters.  PR systems are generally designed to make most people's votes count, that is, have a measurable impact on the formation of the government.  If you know your vote will mean something, it is far more likely you will have motivation to vote.

Allan R. Willms, June, 2022