Submission to Ontario Citizens’ Assembly

Cross-Endorsement and Proxy (One Voter, One Vote)

Antony Hodgson

Summary The Ontario Citizens’ Assembly will be considering a variety of electoral systems. Most likely, both the Mixed Member Proportional and will be discussed. Regardless of which system is chosen, there are two practices which can be independently added to either of these systems (and many other voting systems), both of which would, in my opinion, improve democratic representation. In particular, in this submission, I discuss and advocate cross- endorsement and . Cross-endorsement is the practice of allowing a candidate to accept nominations from more than one party (usually a smaller party nominating a candidate who has received the nomination of a larger party). This has been used to great effect by the Working Families party in New York state as a way to ensure that candidates pay attention to issues important to the party. It is a way for smaller parties to bring their alternative policy ideas to the forefront of public discussion and it allows voters to express support for those policies without the fear of ‘wasting’ their vote by casting it for an unelectable candidate. It is valuable in encouraging citizens who strongly support a single political issue to engage in conversation with parties with more comprehensive platforms. Proxy voting is my term for the idea that our representatives in the legislature would carry voting power equal to the number of voters they represent rather than on a per-member basis. This small change to One Person, One Vote (from One Member, One Vote) neatly solves a common problem in Canada – that of the difficulty associated with geographically large ridings. The most common suggestion for dealing with the difficulty an MPP has in serving a large riding is to make the riding smaller, but this violates the important principle of One Person, One Vote, otherwise expressed as the right to effective representation. With proxy voting, ridings can be made smaller without unfairly decreasing the effective voting power of urban dwellers relative to rural residents. Cross-Endorsement Cross-endorsement (sometimes called open balloting or fusion voting) was widely practiced in the United States in the 19th century. Its purpose was to allow minor parties to influence the platforms of larger parties by opting not to run their own candidate in a particular riding but to endorse one of the major party candidates. A sample ballot appears below to demonstrate how a smaller party (let’s call it the Common Good party) might use cross-endorsement in an Ontario election: Party Candidate 9 Liberal Alex Brown Conservative Candace Delaney NDP Eric Frost Green Ginny Hobson Common Good Candace Delaney 9

Note that the same candidate (Candace Delaney) is listed under both a major party label (Conservative) and the smaller party (Common Good). When votes are counted, the ballots supporting the cross-endorsed candidate are pooled together so that the candidate benefits from the support from the smaller party. Cross endorsement deals quite effectively with the ‘wasted vote’ problem – voters are reluctant to support a candidate that has no chance of winning, but if they can vote for a candidate using the party label of their choice, they can influence that party (and candidate) to change their policies on matters of interest to the smaller party. Cross endorsement (also known as fusion voting or open balloting) was once legal and commonly practiced in all states. It is now legal only in about 7 states, and most widely practiced in New York where the Working Families Party has used it to greatly increase the profile of its key issues. It considers cross endorsement as a way to cast a “protest vote that counts." If the WFP gets a good percentage of votes on its line, it sends a strong message about the importance of their issues. The number of votes cast on the WFP line has often been greater than the winning candidates margin of victory, so they know they owe their success to the WFP and its political activity.

Proxy Voting Historically, Canada has largely adhered to the principle of One Person, One Vote, where the person in question was a citizen. That is, all citizens are considered to be equal under the law and are entitled to an equal voice in government. This has normally meant that electoral ridings have been set up so as to have roughly equal populations in each so that each representative can carry equal voting weight in the legislature, although up to a 25% variation has been found acceptable by the courts. In practice, this limit has occasionally been exceeded, and the largest urban ridings are often up to twice the size of rural ridings. To some extent, this has been tolerated as a means of partially countering the decreasing influence of rural perspectives as Canada has become increasingly urbanised, but this perspective has been challenged in court (e.g., in P.E.I.). In addition, population shifts require changes in riding boundaries on a regular basis, which is frustrating for both MPPs and citizens as they are not sure from election to election which riding they belong in. If we relax the assumption that each representative (MPP) carries equal voting weight in the legislature, and instead allow each MPP to carry voting weight in proportion to the population each MPP represents, it becomes straightforward to set riding boundaries according to logical physical, social and historical characteristics of the riding. More MPPs can be assigned to more rural regions so that it is easier for them to cover their ridings; they would simply represent fewer citizens in votes in the legislature. Riding boundaries would not have to constantly change – the voting weight associated with a riding would simply change from election to election (or indeed from year to year). The major concern with this approach that I can see is that rural voters would, by virtue of the fact that they are currently over-represented in the legislature in population terms, lose some voice in the legislature, but this is easily remedied by applying a weighting factor to such rural ridings that is up to 25% higher than that currently applied in urban ridings. This would be independent of any other steps that might be taken to increase regional autonomy, such as ensuring rural MPPs sit on committees whose mandates affect their regions (under proxy voting, there would be more such MPPs, so they would increase their representation by virtue of their increased numbers, rather than direct voting power).

Page 2 of 3 Compatibility With MMP and STV Both cross-endorsement and proxy voting are perfectly compatible with all major voting systems, including MMP and STV.

Cross-Endorsement With MMP, cross-endorsement would be used primarily in the constituency elections and would go a long way towards eliminating the spoiler or wasted-vote effect. Voters would be able to clearly indicate their support for a particular set of policies by voting for a major party candidate on a small party line, thereby helping to steer the major party’s policies and encouraging them to reach out to the small party’s constituency. With STV, cross-endorsement could equally be used when transferring votes to a major party candidate. There is generally less need for cross-endorsement with STV, since voters can explicitly transfer votes anyway, but it is particularly effective if a small or emerging party is unable to run a candidate in all ridings; by endorsing existing candidates, they can raise their party’s profile in areas where they are still developing or where the district magnitude is small enough that they can’t realistically hope to win a seat in their own right yet.

Proxy Voting With MMP, the constituency representative would carry voting power proportional to the number of people in the riding, while party representatives would carry power proportional to the number of people in the region covered by the list component. With STV, rural ridings could be assigned more representatives; this would allow a greater number of representatives in a given physical area, which would increase the local proportionality of STV.

Summary Both Cross-Endorsement and Proxy Voting will contribute significantly to democratic representation and both can be independently integrated into virtually any , including both MMP and STV.

About the Author: Dr. Antony Hodgson is a professor of mechanical engineering at the University of British Columbia. He is on the board of directors of Fair Voting BC and coordinates Demochoice BC, which runs an educational website (demochoice.ca) aimed at familiarizing British Columbians with how STV works by running virtual online versions of real elections. Demochoice BC hosted virtual versions of the 2005 provincial election, several of the 2005 civic elections, and the BC seats of the 2006 federal election.

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