Folly of change at any cost

The current system must go. But STV does not take us to a better system

by Andrea Reimer

Be it resolved that our electoral system stinks. As an “under 35” women and a self-identified Green Party supporter, there’s no question in my mind that electoral reform is key to improving BC politics. That is why it is with such a heavy heart that I’ll be voting No in the May 17 referendum on BC-STV.

Am I crazy? Some of my friends and colleagues seem to think so. They have suffered through many of my tirades on the need to ditch our antiquated first-past-the-post voting system in favour of proportional representation, on the need to remove the barriers for women, youth and minorities to take a seat at the legislative table.

I certainly have no quibble with the Yes side in this debate that the current system has got to go. Where we differ is on whether the proposed system can deliver on solving those glaring problems and more to the point, whether it’s worth the price.

STV is a system based on complex mathematics that is quite popular with the academic set. But like many ideas with academic appeal, they often don’t work so well in the real world. That might help explain why so few countries have chosen to use STV. Only 1% of the world’s population uses it for parliamentary elections in only two countries—Ireland and Malta. The Australian state of Tasmania also uses STV as does Australian senate, but that’s all.

At its essence STV is not designed to produce proportional results. The only way STV achieves any intentional proportionality is through the size of the multi-member ridings: as in the more members per riding, the more proportional the result.

Without knowing the size of the ridings—they could be between two and seven members—it is impossible to say whether proportionality will increase. One thing we do know is that under STV, every gain voters might make in achieving a fairer result, they will lose in community representation. It hardly seems like a good thing in such a geographically diverse province to dilute community representation seven-fold just to have your vote count.

So far the people on the Yes side I’ve debated have conceded that this trade off is a true fact. But they say it’s worth having a little less of both proportional and community representation to have more candidate-focused elections. STV does allow people to vote for individuals rather than parties and this is one of the favourite features of the pro-STV side.

However, in the real world this almost never happens. In Australian senate elections—also a parliamentary system—they made a change to their STV system to allow “above the line” voting so that the 95% of voters who wanted to, could simply express their party choice rather than wade through ranking hundreds of names on the ballot.

Here in Canada, polls provincially and nationally have shown that 85% of voters mark their ballot based on the party or leader. This actually makes a great deal of sense in a parliamentary system where parties, not individuals, have power to make public policy.

Allowing “above the line” voting based on parties has also allowed Australia to escape the abysmal record STV has at electing women. With such a staggering number of names to compete with, successful candidacy in an STV system depends on the kind of name recognition only incumbency or carpet bombing advertising can buy and which women entering politics generally lack access to. As a result, Ireland is 5 th last and Malta is dead last globally in terms of electing women. On the crucial issue of gender equity in politics, it doesn’t get much worse than that.

It has been suggested that perhaps Ireland is some kind of gender backwater and this might explain why so few women are elected. Consider that although Ireland falls behind Rwanda, Botswana and many other developing countries in electing women, it does much better than BC at educating women, putting women at the head of companies and putting women at the head of their country. Ireland has twice directly elected two different woman presidents.

Less community representation or less proportionality (take your pick) and probably less women elected but certainly no more: I could probably live with all of the above if I thought that this was a weigh station on the path towards something better. But experience shows that the peculiarities that make STV the curiosity it is also make it an evolutionary dead end for electoral reform.

In the big family tree of electoral systems, there is no next step after STV. There are sideways steps like they’ve taken in Australia with “above the line” and there are backwards steps such as a reduction in riding size and thus proportional outcomes (all three STV jurisdictions have made this change over the years to try and keep third parties out).

However, the only way forward would be to go backwards to where we already are and from there start over again until we get it right. “It” being something like Mixed Member Proportional Representation (MMP) which does address all of the shortcomings of STV and our current system. If that’s the direction we want to go—and 85% of submissions to the Citizen’s Assembly were clear it is—I say forget about the detour and let’s keep moving forward.

Why would the Citizen’s Assembly choose such a dead end for BC? If I had the opportunity to invite a globally rare relic from the last century to dinner I’d probably be tempted too. But ask me who I would want to live with, and I’d be looking for something robust and modern. And electoral reform is a guest we’re going to have to live with for a long time to come. Here’s hoping that British Columbians can contain their curiosity and keep working to find a change that doesn’t ask so many to give up so much for so little.

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