Inkless Wells

Paul Wells on all the latest out of Ottawa—along with the occasional post about jazz. Follow Paul on Twitter: @InklessPW
He also offers his thoughtful perspective of Stephen Harper’s last 10 years in his recent eBook, The Harper Decade.

Categories: Capital Read, Inkless Wells

Guess that's a No then

by Paul Wells on Wednesday, May 13, 2009 11:16am - 108 Comments

On the BC electoral reform referendum, it wasn’t even close. BC-STV didn’t carry a voter majority in almost any riding, and it didn’t come anywhere near the 60% threshold in total popular vote. Faced with the same question a second time, far fewer British Columbians voted Yes.

That must settle the question. It was pushing things to ask the electoral-reform question a second time. Advocates of STV, who fancy themselves advocates of greater democracy, must not “give it a rest” or “regroup and try again later” — in British Columbia, they must give up. It’s over.

Advocates of electoral reform elsewhere have to ask themselves serious questions about what went wrong in BC. In no particular order, here are a few thoughts (some of which have been suggested to me in emails from Inkless Irregulars):

• The Yes campaign’s chosen colours were nearly identical to the party colours of the losing party in the general election. That’s really dumb.

• The Yes campaign had no single, highly visible personality to act as standard-bearer for the idea. That sort of person can come in handy during a referendum campaign, as I believe Lucien Bouchard would tell you if you asked.

• The whole asking-twice thing is highly annoying to many voters. They were right to be annoyed. Message to would-be electoral reformers: the price of getting something wrong on your first attempt is very high.

• Just by the luck of things, this referendum fell on the same day as one of British Columbia’s exceedingly rare non-pathological general elections. The Gordon Campbell Liberals won 46% of the popular vote and about 58% of seats. The familiar first-past-the-post phenomenon — a plurality of votes produces a majority of seats — was at play here, but there was no wild distortion of the kind that makes the case for electoral reform, as there usually is in BC elections.

• BC-STV is more complicated than reform should have been. Reform advocates, who like to dive into the minutae of electoral-system theory, have a much higher tolerance for the arcane plumbing of various voting systems than does the ordinary voter. So reform advocates tend to wildly overestimate voter patience for a system that takes more than a few sentences to explain.

Tags: BC-STV, electoral reform

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Paul Wells

test

http://carnewsandviews.com jwl

Was it successful?

Paul Wells

That’s someone seeing whether they can log in with my name even if they’re not me. So now people should keep an eye out for commenters trying to pass themselves off as someone else. I guess it’s crowded down at the playground this time of year.

http://www.maple-leaf-forever.com Stephen Harper

That’s, frankly, immature.

Critical Reasoning

Ah, Lord Bob. You’re such a merry prankster.

http://carnewsandviews.com jwl

Great, that won’t be confusing at all.

I didn’t think Wells was Wells when he first added Gump avatar but I do notice that your name is in bold while the rest of us are normal font size.

Wayne

I am continuosly impressed with the wisdom of the canadian voter!
http://fairvoteubc.wordpress.com Mark Crowley

I personally would agree with most of your suggestion but not necessarily your conclusion that STV isn’t the way to go. Electoral reform is a very important issue and people who are fed up with wasted votes must not rest in raising that issue. This election wasn’t highly distorted but it demonstrates the problem of wasted votes for a third party. The greens deserve seats but in highly polarized BC essentially can’t win no matter what.

When speaking to people I found that much more than 60% of the people wanted change of some kind and were willing to consider STV as that change. The problem, I think, is the entire adversarial approach that has been used in all of the recent referenda in Canada. Having two designated sides arguing for and against brings us back to the failed concept of a popularity contest. What we need is a neutral, widespread government education process for everyone about the various alternatives. We then need two questions for the Canadian people (or the people of any province or city to start). The first question is whether people want to change at all. The second question is which change they’d want. Answering the second question takes a lot of education and public discussion, it may take years but I think people want a better way.
Andrew (not Potter or Coyne)

I’m coming around to the idea that rather than make the full leap to STV, Instant Runoff is a good medium-term solution that can be easily explained, does not completely go against the notion of our current electoral system, yet is compatible with STV as a potential future option. After all, Instant Runoff Voting is a special case of STV where the constituencies are single-member. I could see IRV succeeding in Ontario, along with the Ontario Liberals’ wholehearted support. They are the likeliest second choice of many voters. The argument that IRV favours centrist parties overmuch will also lend credibility to a move toward STV in the future.

Stephanie

Upon examination of my decision not to vote for STV, I came to the same conclusion. Riding size and the possibility for an unequal geographic distribution of members within a riding (and thus unequal representation) were the main reasons why I didn’t support it. IRV addresses these issues while still dealing with the issue of wasted votes.
Charles

I would agree that IRV sounds like a much easier sell – people get to keep their local riding (so no worries about being drowned out by the people from wherever), while still being able to vote for someone who isn’t likely to get a lot of votes without feeling that the vote was wasted. Like, one could vote for the Greens, then the NDP, then the Liberals, and not worry that her vote for the Greens or the NDP was just another vote for the Conservatives.
Murphy

The problem with with using IRV as a gateway drug is that it’s vastly inferior to any of the Condorcet methods. I can’t think of any impartial way to evaluate multi-winner systems, but single-winners systems are another case. IRV is simply wrong.

To quote the mighty Wiki: “IRV fails the monotonicity criterion, consistency criterion, the Condorcet criterion, the participation criterion, reversal symmetry, and the independence of irrelevant alternatives criterion.”

Sisyphus

Damn ! It’s all my fault. I’ll never agree with Coyne again. I promise.
Bobbi

I did vote for it, and I loathe the idea that I don’t understand the returning officer’s methodology in STV. I understand the theory just not the practice. Some ridings would have a complete jumble of candidates, and the ridings would be geographically huge. Already it was hard enough with 5 candidate in one small riding, and I uttlerly disagree with rural stance that takes over 20 minutes north of town. (Happy snob townie).
I just would like to see some different views make it into the legislature, even if they are nutters, rural or otherwise. PT Barnum said something about suckers, I think he meant Canadians voting for “good” government.
wayneneon

So once again, one political party has ALL the power, even though most people voted against them.

Most of us are “represented” by somebody we voted against, and most MLAs “represent” mostly people who voted against them.

And apparently, most people in BC think all this is OK.

I don’t think it’s OK, and I am not going to stop saying so.
khai

Paul’s last point was the most important. Most voters want some kind of reform, but not one that is wonky and hard to understand. A simple preferential ballot would have been widely accepted. But what we get is a preferential ballot that gives us more than one MLA in some ridings, which strikes most of us as odd.
Jim R

Count me as another BCer who voted for STV not because it was perfect, but because it was better than what we now have. Having said that I am in total agreement with a number of other people that the preferential ballot is the way to go. It’s simple to understand, gives smaller parties a real chance, eliminates the negative aspects of vote splitting, and is unlikely to create continuous minority governments. It has always been my preferred voting system and I was disappointed when the Citizen’s Assembly did not recommend it. Too bad it will be a long, long time before BC will look again at electoral reform.
http://skinnydips.blogspot.com Skinny Dipper

I did let Andrew Coyne know in an email that the NDP colours hurt the STV campaign. Also, the campaign really needed a leader to go around the province to rally supporters and whip up support from undecideds The STV campaign needed someone who could connect to the media.

This is only an estimate. About 95% of campaigning is through the media. The other 5% is local. The STV campaign seemed to put a lot of human and financial resources at the local level (more than 5%). It meant that the campaign couldn’t reach everyone. The NO STV side had about 99% of its resources in media spots and could reach almost everyone at least once.

Fair voting reformers tend to be consensual people who like to share internal power with everyone. This seems like the antithesis of fair representation, but reformers needed a strong personality to lead the STV campaign in BC. This didn’t happen.