Electoral Reform Misses the Point

As you may have heard, when we British Columbians go to the polls for the May 18th provincial election we’ll actually be voting twice. Along with electing members of the Provincial parliament we’ll also be voting on a referendum asking if we want to change BC’s electoral system. Specifically, we’ll be asked if we want to swap our present voting system with the “STV electoral system as recommended by the Citizen’s Assembly on Electoral Reform.” I’m voting no.

Now as you’ll remember if you read that little interview thing I did a few weeks ago, I was initally very excited and encouraged by Premier Campbell’s decision to form a “citizens assembly” to investigate the flaws and merits of our current electoral system. The idea of appointing 161 ordinary British Columbians from across the province to freely debate and discuss political reform was a truly creative and revolutionary idea. Whatever his other faults may be, Campbell deserves honest praise for being courageous enough to follow through with the bold plan.

That being said, while the citizen assembly was a nice forum for discussion, it was hardly inevitable that the 161 member panel would come up with a good recommendation for change. Their decision to recommend the so-called “single transferable vote” (STV) system to the province is a deeply flawed, and indeed even somewhat baffling conclusion. The committee that was supposed to represent the voices of “average” British Columbians have ended up suggesting a solution to our voting woes that is so complex and sophisticated it requires a team of political scientists to successfully explain. The decision was clearly spurned on by the council’s egghead academic “advisors” and almost certainly not one that the committee members would have ever reached independently. The whole thing reeks of a political fad.

A good rule of thumb in life is to never sign or vote for anything you don’t understand. I’m majoring in political science, and I still don’t fully understand the STV system. For a while I was thinking it would be cute if sometime before the election I could do a special feature for the OP explaining the STV system using little cartoon illustrations. But the damn system is so complicated even cartoons can’t explain it. It cannot be simplified, it’s just that bizarre. Trying to describe it in less than a thousand words is hopelessly misleading, while accurately describing it with more than a thousand words is migraine-inducing.

I don’t know if you ever watch South Park, but there was this one episode where there were a gang of gnomes who stole underpants from children at night. When asked to explain why they did it, the Gnomes replied “profit.” When asked to explain in greater detail, the Gnomes replied “stage one, get underpants. Stage two…… Stage three, profit!” It’s the same with STV. Stage one, rank all the candidates in order of preference. Stage two…… Stage three, people are elected and somehow everything ends up being more fair and democratic than it is now.

I won’t attempt to criticize the bizarre mathematical calculating system that STV uses to elect people via numerical rankings, because as I said, I don’t understand it. What I will criticize, however, is the STV gimmick that may soon force us to elect multiple MLAs in each riding. Apparently some ridings will have up to seven MLAs in all, should this system be implemented.

Now I live in Coquitlam, which is a fairly large community. Let’s say my riding will have four MLA’s under STV, which seems possible. If I want to be an informed voter, I should know the names of the candidates running for the two major parties, the NDP and the Liberals. Let’s say I also want to be open-minded, so I try to learn the names of all the Green party people running as well. If there are four seats up for grabs that’s already 12 candidates to keep track of. Worst of all, parties will be able to run multiple candidates in ridings, so my riding could easily have six Liberals, seven NDP, and five Greens, all engaged in some huge political battle royale. It’s hard enough just remembering where the party leaders stand on the issues, let alone an endless parade of MLA candidates. At best, under such a system I imagine citizens would just blindly vote for any guy with “NDP” or “Liberal” beside his name, with little thought being given towards the personality of the candidate himself. When you have over a dozen people running its hard to develop an intimate relationship with any of them, a far cry from the claim that STV will somehow create more “community centric” MLAs. If anything, voting patterns will just get more mindlessly partisan out of sheer confusion.

Our current first-past-the-post electoral system is far from perfect. In the last election alone something like 30% of our MLAs were elected with only a plurality of the popular vote, meaning that many men and women are sitting in Victoria despite the fact that most members of their ridings didn’t want them there. Though this is obviously a problem, I’ve never understood why the only “solution” is to radically change our entire electoral system with all this STV / proportional representation nonsense. When your house has a broken window you try to fix it, you don’t buy a new house. If no candidate can manage to win a majority of the popular vote in a riding why not simply have a second run-off election immediately after, in which only the “top two” candidates are allowed to run? This system is used in many countries all over the world- noticeably in France and many US states- and is very simple for voters to understand. Critics will often suggest that voting a second time is too much of a hassle, but honestly, we vote like twice every four years. If you consider voting one more time “fatiguing” then maybe you shouldn’t bother voting at all.

In the end however, tinkering with the electoral system is really little more than an amusing distraction. Although it’s clear Campbell’s heart was in the right place when he devised the “citizens assembly,” making the council’s mandate “electoral reform” was in retrospect a mistake. When it comes to elements of our current political system that trouble average voters I imagine “how the ballots look” is pretty far down on the ol’ priority scale. Far more pressing issues to address include party discipline, political appointments, legislative independence, and checks and balances on the power of the premier. This first issue appears to be a particularly intense priority. As long as MLAs can be pistol-whipped into voting the party line every single time or face expulsion, we’ll never have meaningful parliamentary democracy in government. The citizen’s assembly report itself even gives some lipservice to this concern, and makes a rather unsuccessful attempt to describe the STV electoral system as one that “weakens” party discipline. “Because legislative caucuses will include MLAs whose continuing electoral success will depend on representing their local communities regardless of party politics, the pressures of party discipline will decrease,” says page 6. Comforting words, but short on specifics. As discussed, the STV system is so confusing it is actually likely to provoke more party-line voting, not less. The report’s repeated passing references to voter concerns about party discipline clearly indicate the citizen’s assembly has missed its true calling.

There are only two real ways to weaken party discipline and truly reform parliament in BC. One is to simply abolish the antiquated practice of “confidence voting” and give MLAs the right to freely vote however they want without the fear of causing a “collapse” of the government hanging over their heads. The other possible solution would be to elect the premier independently of the legislature, so voters can actually put some thought into electing the most competent representative for their riding, and not simply view MLAs as pointless middlemen whose only real purpose is to help launch a certain party leader into the Premier’s office. These are the real issues a citizen’s assembly needs to debate. Everything else is just so much window-dressing