Bruce Hallsor: Although B.C. rejected STV, electoral reform has only just begun
By Bruce Hallsor
The provincial election on May 12 saw another alarming drop in voter participation, with barely half of all eligible voters casting their ballots. The participation rate among voters under 30 is less than 25 percent. This is alarming and threatens the very legitimacy of our democracy.
While it is true that most of the one-half of eligible voters who did bother to turn out did reject the proposed single-transferable-vote system, this cannot mean that electoral reform is a dead issue in British Columbia. In fact, all the polls noted that there was an appetite for electoral reform, and there was widespread dissatisfaction with our first-past-the-post system. This is probably why the “No” side in the referendum agreed that electoral reform was necessary, and merely argued that BC-STV was not the best choice.
We all know that the following things still happened to voters on May 12, as they do in most elections:
Ӣ In most ridings, the voters already knew who was going to win before the election started. For them, voting was an important civic duty, but was largely a waste of time.
”¢ In most cases, a voter’s ballots had no impact whatsoever on the legislature. More than 60 percent of voters cast ballots that counted for nothing.
Ӣ Many voters attempted to make their ballots count for something by choosing not to vote for the candidate they wanted to vote for, and instead voted for somebody they did not prefer, in order to try and stop someone else.
Ӣ Many voters were encouraged to vote for the party that was assumed to be winning the election, so they could have a representative in government.
Ӣ Many voters felt conflicted between a party they like, and a candidate they preferred.
Is it any wonder that more and more people, when they look at these choices, choose to simply stay home? None of this is going to improve unless we find a way to change our electoral system.
I, for one, will look forward to hearing creative and innovative reform ideas from all British Columbians, including the many people on the “No” side who said that we needed electoral reform. I invite them all to join Fair Voting B.C., and start again to look at positive ways that we can push for a new electoral system.
British Columbians have spoken on the issue of electoral reform. 600,000 of them voted for STV. 900,000 voted against STV. And 1.5 million did not vote at all. It is now up to all of us to find a way to re-engage the majority of voters in our electoral process. I thank the 600,000 who recognized this problem and voted for STV. I expect that those British Columbians will support future efforts at reform. I trust that a majority of the other 900,000 voters will help us find other solutions to deal with the many problems with first past the post.
Bruce Hallsor is a Victoria lawyer who was a founding director of Fair Vote Canada and is a past president of Fair Voting B.C.
Comments
1 Comments
Mark Crawford
Jun 10, 2009 at 11:42pm
Bill Tieleman and others have proffered the solution of compulsory voting, but one gets the feeling that that solution is only treating a symptom and not the disease. To the extent that the problem is that voters are just too busy nowadays, compulsory voting is a satisfactory answer; to the extent that declining sense of voter efficacy, cultural shift, paucity of meaningful choices and unrepresentative legislatures are behind voting decline, more drastic measures are needed.
That being said, BC-STV is dead. The surprisingly low support for the system recommended by the Citizens' Assembly (39%, down from 58% in 1995), has even caused me to reconsider my own preferred solution, STV-lite. I was prepared, in the event of a "moral victory" of a 50% +1 vote, to wage an extensive campaign for a system that would be less proportional than BC-STV, but better at local representation ( 3-member ridings for big cities; dual ridings for southern interior and small cities; single rdings for the north). But perhaps the fatal flaw in STV was that its very name drew attention to a complicated vote-counting system. Perhaps the Citizens' Assembly should have understood that the perfect was the enemy of the good and that reaching for proportionality through STV was going to be a difficult sell. Better to drop the preferential ballot altogether and go back to the drawing board.
Specifically, we should go permanently back to 60 single -member constituences. The rest of the Legislature would consist of "at large regional MLAs", 4-6 larger electoral districts of 4-6 members each, depending on population densities and so on. An open list could still give voters the option of ranking the individual candidates of their preferred party, if they so wished; the "dual ballot" would be a simpler concept to understand than STV. Parties would be motivated to field lists that are ethnically and gender-balanced; local representation would hardly suffer and would arguably improve from having a "regional" dimension as well as a local one. Proportionality would be improved mildly. And minor parties would have a slightly better chance of getting elected (voter thresholds for 6-member seats being in the 16% range). Would a referendum be needed to validate such a proposal? I don't thinks so, but if so, then only a 50% threshold should be needed for this less drastic, and ultimately more sensible compromise.