Fair voting is as easy as 1, 2, 3

I don’t want to alarm you, but there is a small bomb about to go off under the Ontario legislature. All but unnoticed by the media, a group of seemingly ordinary citizens from across the province have been meeting since the summer, planning, learning, steeling themselves for the task ahead. Their name: the Citizens’ Assembly on Electoral Reform. Their mission, should they choose to accept it: overthrow Ontario’s political system.

Well, give it a good shake at any rate. One of the few election promises Dalton McGuinty kept, the assembly has been handed the remarkable assignment of investigating what, if any, reforms should be made to the way Ontarians are represented in their legislature: whether the province should stick with the old plurality or “first-past-the-post” system it has used since its founding, or whether it should adopt some other system, typically one form or another of “proportional representation.” Whatever changes they propose will be put to a referendum at the next provincial election, October 4, 2007.

I say “remarkable” for good reason: that any government elected under the old system of counting the votes would be willing to consider another is one thing, but that it would be willing to entrust this task to a group of plain folks is just astonishing. Like the British Columbia Citizens Assembly on which it is modelled, the assembly is not made up of the usual assortment of interest group axe-grinders and condescending experts that tend to show up at these things. Indeed, it is almost entirely free of politically correct jury-rigging: just one man and one woman drawn at random from each of Ontario’s 103 ridings. And if the B.C. experience is any guide, their recommendations will be taken all the more seriously because of it. 

In that province’s referendum, fully 57% of the public, including a majority of the voters in 77 of 79 ridings, voted to ditch first-past-the-post in favour of a little-known and hardly used system known as the single transferable vote, or STV. Opponents had every advantage, including fear of the unknown, appeals to tradition and a reform scheme that, besides being famously hard to explain, sounded like a sexual disease. Yet the proposal very nearly passed: just three points shy of the 60% bar the government had set.

Of course, it wasn’t only the assembly’s Capraesque appeal that gave the proposal legs. It was also the manifest failings of first-past-the-post. Can anyone be unaware of these by now? It regularly thrusts parties into power with massive majorities based on much less than a majority of the votes -- indeed, in some cases with fewer votes than their nearest rivals. It discriminates against smaller parties, who may have broad support among the public but cannot concentrate it in sufficient numbers to win seats, even as it rewards regional grievance-mongers, whose votes naturally cluster geographically.

But the most unconscionable effect of first-past-the-post is not that it discriminates between parties. It’s that it discriminates between voters. The voter who sides with the winning candidate in his riding gets full representation in Parliament. The two thirds or more of voters who sided with another candidate get none. It took about 43,000 voters to elect each Tory or Liberal MP in the last federal election. The NDP, on the other hand, with 2.6 million voters, won only 29 seats -- or about 90,000 votes per seat -- while the Bloc Quebecois, with just 1.6 million voters, got 51 seats: roughly one for every 30,000 voters. 

In other words, one Bloc vote was worth about three NDP votes -- while the 650,000 voters who supported the Greens found their vote was worth nothing at all. This is simply insupportable.

Whether the Ontario assembly will come to the same conclusion as its BC forerunner when it reports next spring remains to be seen. But you could do a lot worse than the STV. It’s not that hard to explain: you just mark your ballot in order of preference, 1, 2, 3 and so on. Indeed, Canadians have some familiarity with this system from the party leadership races, including the upcoming Liberal vote. The diference is that, whereas in the latter system only the votes of the trailing candidates are redistributed after each round, the STV does the same with the votes of the “winners.” That’s because under the STV, voters elect more than one member per riding: once a candidate has enough first-choice votes to be mathematically certain of election, his supporters’ second and third choices are used to determine who else will join him.

I have just one suggestion for the assembly, should they opt for this model. Don’t call it the STV. Call it the “1-2-3.” Had they done so in BC, it might well be law today.