The case against first past the post
By every one of these definitions, Canada, under the electoral system in use today, is not a democracy....
By every one of these definitions, Canada, under the electoral system in use today, is not a democracy. We are not governed by majorities, competition between parties is not free and fair, nor do their relative fortunes depend on their popularity with the voters. Most striking of all, we do not give every citizen equal say at election time. Everyone may get one vote, that is true. But some votes count more than others. Some -- most, in fact -- do not count at all.
That is the record of plurality or "first-past-the-post" voting, the system Ontario voters are to be asked to replace in next month’s referendum. Its supporters appeal to a sentiment of “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” But it is broke, and this is the opportunity to fix it.
Consider some of the results of recent elections. In Ontario, an NDP government was elected in 2000 with 37% of the vote. In British Columbia, the NDP won a majority of the seats in the 1996 election though it received less than 40% of the vote -- not merely fewer than a majority, but fewer than its nearest rivals, the Liberals.
These are hardly unusual. In 26 federal elections since 1921, there have been 16 majority governments elected, but only two that actually commanded a majority of the vote. The rest were minorities posing as majorities, wielding undivided power though as many as five voters in eight voted against them. Supporters of the status quo cite its tendency to produce stable majority governments. But these aren’t majority governments. They’re legalized coup d’etats.
False majorities are but one of the distortions to which the present system gives rise. It is not unknown in this country for one party to take all or nearly all of the seats in the house, with 60% or less of the popular vote -- as happened in B.C. in 2001, and New Brunswick in 1987. The 40% of the public or more who voted for other parties, with other philosophies, were effectively disenfranchised: entitled to vote, but not to representation, which alone gives votes meaning.
Small, startup parties, like the Greens, know what it’s like to be shut out. In the last federal election, the Greens obtained more than 660,000 votes, nearly 5% of the popular vote -- yet they got zero seats. Nor is that injustice restricted to the smaller parties. The 27% of Albertans who voted Liberal or NDP in 2006, but got no seats; the 38% of Ontarians who voted Conservative or Alliance in 2004, but got two seats; the majorities of Quebecers who voted for federalist parties in every election since 1993, only to see the Bloc Quebecois take a majority of the seats -- how much different would our history have been had our electoral system not presented, time and time again, such a false picture of the country?
These anomalies and distortions are reflections of what goes on at the riding level: The winner is not the candidate who receives a majority of the votes cast, but simply the one who comes in first place. With four candidates, it can be done with as little as 25% plus one of the vote. The other 75% of the voters are rewarded for doing their civic duty with … bupkus. All in all, between one-half and two-thirds of all the votes cast in a given election are, in this sense, wasted.
The practice of giving representation only to the winning party is what biases the system against smaller parties, or against larger parties that are in a minority in a given region: a party’s success depends not on now many votes it has overall, but how well it can bunch them geographically. Hence the Conservatives, in 1993, won 16% of the vote nationwide, and were rewarded with two seats, while the Reform party, with 18.7% of the vote, won 52 -- two seats fewer than the Bloc was able to win, with just 13.5% of the vote.
The result is, in democratic terms, chaos. Nobody knows what impact their vote will have, or how it will translate into seats. Indeed, they are often told they cannot even vote for the party of their choice, for fear of “splitting” the vote, but rather must vote for some other party, to stop yet a third from getting in. All we know with certainty is that some votes count for less than others -- a lot less. When 2.6 million federal NDP votes equal 19 seats, as in 2006, but 1.6 million Bloc votes equal 51 seats, it means that each Bloc vote was worth more than four NDP votes.
Phoney majorities, barriers to competition, discrimination between voters -- that’s the case against the current system. I’ll deal with the alternative proposed for Ontario, mixed-member proportional, in another column.
9/26/2007
