Approval Voting with Cluster Seats

APPROVAL VOTING WITH CLUSTER SEATS (AV/CS) A Non-Competitive Voting System for Ontario (Presentation to the Ontario Citizens Assembly on Electoral Reform) Chris Bradshaw, Ottawa, Ontario, January 15, 2007 INTRODUCTION: I have been interested in voting systems since I attended university – where we elected our student council using something called “fractional redistribution” – and since coming to Ottawa in 1969 and experiencing a voting system which allowed citizens to vote for two ward-council candidates and for four board of controllers. More recently, I have been active in the Green Party, which has championed alternative voting systems that would reduce strategic voting that Greens feel deprive it of votes, let alone any chance of electing MLAs. I have a degree in political science and worked most of my life doing public consultation in municipal planning. Also, I have run provincially twice, in 1999 and 2003, in the Ottawa Centre seat, finishing with the highest % of votes of any GPO candidate both times. I am not, however, speaking for the party tonight. It was the old City of Ottawa voting experience that is at the basis of the system I propose today. On the one hand, it preventing voters from marking more names than there were seats to be filled, but, on the other, candidates and their supporters urged voters to mark fewer names, a practice called “plumping.” Why should a voter’s ballot be declared ‘spoiled’ if they marked more choices than permitted, but not if they voted for fewer? How many voters marked more names than seats and effectively lost their voting franchise? In fact, why would we devise a voting system that would declare any ballots spoiled? Does marking more than one co-equal choice give that voter more (read undemocratic) power than another voter marking fewer than allowed? No, since marking extra choices simply dilutes one’s vote, while still adhering to the democratic principle of voter fairness: no voter should be able to affect the relative standing between the candidates by more than a unit of one. CANDIDATE COMPETITION: When we force voters to either mark only one candidate or even to rank-order them, we are making the candidates more competitive than we need to, and that behaviour taints both election campaigns and the behaviour of parties and their parliamentarians, worried that if they do something good with another party, they could be helping their ‘enemy.’ Minority governments would work better – and last longer – if parties could more easily find common ground on a limited legislative agenda for as long as it took to get it into law, after which the largest party could find new coalition partners for additional legislative work. When candidates see a vote for another candidate as being a lost vote for himself, it induces attempts to get voters to dislike the alternatives; and failing that, to at least discourage the voter from casting a ballot at all! There is too much winner-take-all attitude in politics; only the most partisan voters subscribe to that principle; the rest are just turned off by it and by the behaviour of politicians and their supporters to gain – or stay in – power at all costs. Voter participation is hurt by this. Ironically, this forced choice on the ballot is not reflected in our other laws and practices: voters can financially support more than one party or candidate, and still receive full tax credits; voters can work for more than one candidate; voters can post signs for multiple candidates on their lawn, and even hold a membership in more than one party (although the parties specifically forbid it, it is impossible to Approval Voting with Cluster Seats (AV/CS) Bradshaw, Ottawa, January 16, 2007 enforce); and they can mix and match. The supposedly ‘normal’ human propensity to search for the one choice that is “best” was successfully challenged by Herbert Simon of Carnegie-Mellon University won the Nobel Prize in Economics for discovering that people do more ‘satisficing’ (finding the most available option that is ‘good enough’) than optimizing. I urge the Assembly to opt for my proposal that includes approval voting; allowing voters to mark each choice that they are satisfied with seems more practical than forcing them to arrive at “the best,” while still accommodating those that do want to make the extra effort. THE PROPOSED SYSTEM (Approval Voting with Cluster Seats, or AV/CS1): I have for some time concluded that all system used by countries or their provinces/states had serious limitations. I believe I have one that avoid their drawbacks, a unique system that could become Ontario’s gift to the democratic world. It consists of the following: * The total number of seats will be divided up: my preference is for 2/3 of seats being local constituency seats and 1/3 being “cluster seats” determined by recycling ‘unused’ votes. * Ballots allow voters to mark as many candidates as they want (including marking all or marking none). Each mark is called an “approval” since voters are only indicating which choices they approve of. [cf. http://www.approvalvoting.org/] * The local seat is awarded to the candidates with the most ‘approvals,’ but only if that candidate is approved by a majority of those casting ballots. Seats in constituencies that don’t meet the majority criteria become – until the next general election – a “cluster” seat. * All approvals not used to determine the winner go into the provincial ‘pot.’ Includes are approvals for those not winning, as well as approvals cast for winning candidates that exceed either the majority criterion or exceed those garnered by the second-place candidate. * Elections Ontario divides the ‘pot’ among the ‘unused’ approvals, after adding to the cluster seats those local seats that could not be awarded, due to the lack of a majority for any of the candidates. Each party then divide the constituencies they did not win into the number of geographically contiguous (regional) clusters equal to the number of cluster seats they earned. Elections Ontario then names that party’s constituency candidate in that cluster of constituencies that had the highest percentage of approvals in their own race (using percentage rather than absolute number of approvals ensures that different populations or different voter turnouts do not become a factor). The result is that voters have a local MLA for their constituency and a cluster MLA for each other party whose candidate they approved of. There are no province-wide MLAs or double ballots (e.g., MMP). 1 I submitted an earlier paper on this system to the Law Commission of Canada in the winter of 2003 Approval Voting with Cluster Seats (AV/CS) Bradshaw, Ottawa, January 16, 2007 ANALYSIS: Approval voting is an old concept that has only recently become used in professional societies, together representing 450,000 professionals. The secretary-general of the U.N. is also elected via AV. The use of ‘unused votes’ is borrowed from the single-transferrable vote (STV). Using the guide’s list of criteria (plus two additional criteria), here is my assessment of my system: 1. Legitimacy – This is probably the most difficult to predict, since the confidence of the electorate comes only with experience. It is the simplest and most transparent. 2. Fairness of Representation – AC/CS is better than any at reflecting every voter preference with equal weight. It also provides every MLA with a clear constituency, either all the voters in a constituency, or all the voters of his party in several adjacent constituencies. And, because all ‘unused’ approvals get a second life, no vote is wasted and no ‘safe’ (i.e., lopsided and unvarying support for a particular party) vote or electoral district is taken for granted, and therefore ignored. FPTP is also unfair because it discourages small parties with wide geographical appeal and a positive message, while it encourages smaller parties with regional appeal and negative messages. 3. Voter Choice – I find both FPTP’s one-choice limitation and STV’s and alternative-voting’s rank- order voting to be confusing, confining, and intimidating. Approval voting overcomes these problems. First, there is no spoiled ballots, since multiple choices are allowed, and any kind of unambiguous mark is acceptable. Second, there is no chance that, on long rank-order ballots (e.g., STV), a voter will use a number twice, or leave out a number in sequence. Third, the voter is not placed into a moral dilemma, where he has to act ‘strategically,’ either by eliminating in his mind less popular (in other voters’ minds) choices, or to rank the choices in a way to have the most impact on the results. With my system, every mark has an equal impact, with no ‘pecking order.’ With AV, voters are able to give their support to candidates that are effective legislators and to those with their policy priorities. To be able to voice the what as well as the who of the next government is liberating to not just the voter, but the people elected. 4. Effective Parties – I would ask, if FPTP is so satisfactory, why is it not used by any Canadian party to elect its leaders or its candidates? And, compared to list systems, AV/CS denies parties the prerogative to guarantee the election of unpopular candidates by putting them at the top of their fixed-lists. 5. Stable and Effective Government – FPTP does best of any to create majority governments, but it does so only by skewing election results in a way that growing numbers of voters say is not legitimate. On the other hand, since all the alternatives reduce the chance for majorities, you want a voting system that engenders parties and candidates to better prepare for working across party lines, to find a majority of parliamentarians who can agree on a particular initiative.

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