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by Paul George
On September 12, BC’s unique Citizens’ Assembly on Electoral Reform (CA) decided BC deserves a voting system where every vote counts.
For the last eight months 160 citizens randomly chosen from BC’s voters list - one man and one women from each of BC’s 79 electoral districts plus two people of First Nations’ heritage - have assessed whether BC would be better off with a fairer voting system.
All spring they learned how different voting systems work. All summer they sought public input. Now they’re making decisions. The CA’s work ends December 15. It will write the question that goes to referendum at the next general election. The new electoral system on the ballot must pass by 60 percent to be adopted.
Over 98 percent of the people giving input through the 50 public hearings held across BC, by mail and on-line to the CA’s website www.citizensassembly.bc.ca, wanted change. All agreed that our current system has serious flaws. It produces overblown majorities, like the last election when the Liberals got 97 percent of the seats with 58 percent of the vote, and wrong winners, like the 1996 election when the NDP won a majority government despite getting less of the vote than the Liberals.
On September 12, the CA members selected proportionality, local representation and voter choice to be the three most important elements in a new voting system. In a proportional system a political party gets seats in proportion to its popular vote (10 percent of the vote earns 10 percent of the seats). Local representation means that voters elect someone to represent their geographical region, like we elect MLAs today.
Over 70 percent of the 1,500 people who sent on-line submissions to the CA recommended a mixed member proportional (MMP) system like New Zealand’s where voters get two votes, one for a local constituency representative and one for the political party of their choice. (This system was well explained by Guy Dauncey in the April 2002 issue of Common Ground.) The party vote is used to elect MLAs from party lists to “top up” a party’s representation in the legislature if it did not get its fair share of seats through winning constituency contests.
The other system being considered, backed in less than five percent of submissions to the CA, is called single transferable vote (STV). It is a complex system of large electoral districts with three or more MLAs elected in each. Voters rank the candidates in order of preference. The counting system is complex with peoples’ second and subsequent choices weighing in if first choice candidates do not get above the minimum vote needed to be elected. This system is less proportional than MMP.
Let’s hope the CA listens to the public input and designs an MMP system to fit BC. MMP is more proportional, more popular and makes most voters’ first choice count towards representation. It is simpler to understand and explain. MMP has a proven record of electing more women and has the best chance of being adopted on May 17, 2005.
Paul George is a director of the Free Your Vote Society www.freeyourvote.bc.ca
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