A recent Canadian Press story effectively debunks the theory that if the Liberal government
imposes a ranked-ballot system for national elections, they will
somehow guarantee themselves power in perpetuity.
Next week, as hearings into electoral
reform resume, Conservative supporters will resume using stats
gathered from voting patterns in past elections as proof of election
results in future elections, if the current first-past-the-post
system were dropped. Which, according to the experts quoted in the CP
article, is extremely unlikely.
Brian Tanguay of Wilfred Laurier
University, York University's Dennis Pilon and Ken Carty of the
University of British Columbia all agree that if you change balloting
systems, you also change voting patterns. So it becomes impossible to
predict future performance by studying obsolete past performances.
Far more likely, they say, a
ranked-ballot voting system will produce governments that more
closely resemble the collective will of voters, without the
complications and confusion of calculating winners and losers through
a proportional representation system. And without having to change
electoral boundaries or increase the number of MPs already crowding
Parliament.
Under the current system, both national
and provincial parties regularly gain local riding victories with
substantially less than majority support from voters. More, the
victors nationally and provincially regularly manage to assemble
majority legislatures far in excess of the expressed support of
voters.
The fear of this happening leads people
to pull their votes away from candidates and parties that they
actually support, in favour of candidates and parties they merely
hope can defeat a candidate or party they despise.
Even worse, parties with platforms that
many voters would like to support do not attract viable candidates in
many ridings, because (a Donald Trump charge here) the system is
rigged against them. A minority party has little hope of advancing
its agenda in rock-ribbed ridings that have always voted a certain
way — despite those ribs being much thinner than advertised.
In Canada, this is called democracy. It
is anything but. First-past-the-post balloting cannot possibly
produce democratically-elected governments that reflect the
collective will of the voters in our diverse, interconnected society.
With a ranked-ballot system, voters
with a minority view can much more effectively register support
for their views at the ballot box. They are not “wasting” their
vote in a hopeless cause, because other parties will need to change
their platforms slightly to attract these voters' second choice or
third choice.
Not every voter can be happy with the
outcome of every race — that's just life. But every voter can at
least be assured their votes were even counted.
That's a vast improvement over the
current system, where winners are frequently declared minutes after
the polls close, and with a mere fraction of the votes even counted.
That is the greatest outrage of all, under our current system.
Electoral reform is a big deal and a
huge undertaking for our rookie federal government. But they should
not let the perfect become the enemy of the good.
A ranked-ballot system is easy to
inaugurate, easy to understand, does not require Ottawa to house
dozens more MPs, nor a wholesale re-drawing of electoral maps.
It does not guarantee victories for any
particular party, nor even guarantee majority governments. But it
does guarantee that every MP must get a majority of votes in their
ridings, and it does force parties that hope to govern a diverse
society like Canada to better consider voters outside their core
support.
That looks a whole lot more like
democracy than the system we've got now. It's also a whole lot more
achievable than a messy constitutional battle and complex national
referendum that would most likely result in no reform at all.
Follow Greg Neiman's blog at
Readersadvocate.blogspot.ca
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