Vote STV elections not single-member exclusions. STV elections, not single member exclusions nor list appointments. Summary. The consensus of the Ontario Citizens Assembly was for a proportional count, as seems to be the case among submissions so far. Then, the key question is: do all the voters get a preference vote (as with Single Transferable Vote, STV) or is a preference vote granted only to the privileged, who rank candidates on Party Lists, including in the Mixed Member Proportional system, MMP? I agree with the British Columbia Citizens Assembly recommendation of the Single Transferable Vote for proportional representation with its democratic preference voting, that can rank choice of candidates from the same and different parties, to transcend divisions for a desired degree and kind of national unity. If the Citizens Assembly decides STV is the best system for Ontario, its less sparse population, than in BC, might justify a marginly more proportional representation. References, to this Guidelined Submission, link to my original submission, on the web page, Citizens Assemblies of Canada choose a voting system. To sugar the pill, that review has appropriate color paintings and monochrome engravings of pioneer Canada! Questions from Assembly members are welcome. (E-mail: [email protected]) Contents: ● The mandate ● Order and proportion are essential to electoral system. ● Principled recommendation: STV. ● The official briefs paradox that no one right method is the one right method. ● The fallacy of pre-emptive voting methods. ● Farewell. ● Appendix 1: on some mistakes in the brief. ● Appendix 2: on a further unconstitutional veto effected by the double-60 referendum threshold ● References. The mandate. http://www.citizensassembly.gov.on.ca/documents/633024516305177500_OntarioCA_0.html (1 of 26)02/01/2007 11:23:37 AM Vote STV elections not single-member exclusions. The Ontario Citizens Assembly mandate regards the electoral system, in particular these questions: 1. The type of ballot (for example do voters mark one X or rank candidates according to preferences) 2. How our votes are counted at election time 3. The number of representatives per electoral district (riding) 4. The geographical size of electoral districts 5. The size of the legislature The first two questions concern the general nature of electoral systems. All elections consist of a vote and a count. The kind of vote and the kind of count is the main Assembly decision of principle: voter choice. Indeed, to elect means to choose out. That decision will condition the three remaining questions, which relate mainly to how local is the representation to be. 1: The choices of vote. In principle, electing or choosing is very simple to understand. Firstly, the type of ballot. The Assembly mandate says: for example X-voting or ranked choice. But one or the other is all the choice there is to make. It is one or the other. That is essentially all there is. The different ways of counting X-votes or ordinal votes comes after the two choices of vote. It gets better. The X-vote and the ranked vote are not really different kinds of vote. They only differ in the amount of choice they offer. The X-vote gives a single order of choice: one candidate before another or others. The X-vote, for single order of choice, is the least elective of votes, sometimes a tactical (strategic) vote for a lower preference to keep out a least prefered candidate. Giving each voter more than one X-vote says nothing about the order of choice between each of the X- voted candidates. Several X-votes per voter, for several candidates, count against each other. Cumulative Voting allows some candidates to have more X-votes than others. But one X-vote for a candidate still counts against one of, say, two X-votes for a more prefered candidate. Also, cumulating more than one X-vote, on one candidate, denies those cumulated votes to other candidates who might be worth prefering compared to the rest. Cumulative voting was a failed experiment in ranked choice. (This is also the defect of points systems, like the method of Borda, that gives more points to higher ranked choices.) Lower preferences do not count against higher preferences, with a proportional count of a preference vote, in a multi-member constituency: If the most prefered candidate gets more votes than a winning proportion of the votes, that candidate is elected, and the surplus vote cannot count against the win, http://www.citizensassembly.gov.on.ca/documents/633024516305177500_OntarioCA_0.html (2 of 26)02/01/2007 11:23:37 AM Vote STV elections not single-member exclusions. when it is transfered to help elect next prefered candidates. This method is called the Single Transferable Vote, STV. The arithmetic, of counting surplus votes to transfer, is the Gregory method, also called the Senatorial Rules, as used for Commonwealth senates. (Currently, Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper has proposed that citizens vote on potential senators during federal elections, using STV.) When there are no surplus votes to transfer, then STV falls back on an exclusion count: the candidate, with the least first preferences, is excluded and his votes re-distributed to next preferences.The exclusion count is not as logicly water-tight, as the Senatorial Rules, because some candidate gets excluded, at a stage in the count, when they just happen to be trailing the other candidates. This summary justice has been criticised out of proportion to its effect, which it is not practical to exploit, anyway. Premature exclusion of a trailing candidate may be more simple than strictly just, but STV has already taken more trouble than any other system to respect voter preferences, making it the least exclusive voting system. For instance, Single Member Plurality (First Past The Post) is more exclusion count than election count, whenever there are more than two candidates. (Even for just two candidates, SMP is as much an exclusion as an election.) Party Lists are the preference votes of party bosses, and you cannot get much more exclusive than that! 2: The choices of count. When we ask how to count who are the most representative candidates, again there is a pleasant surprise. Just as there are only two choices of vote, so there are only two choices of count, majority counting and proportional counting. And it gets better still. Remember, X-voting, giving one choice to order, is only the most limited kind of vote compared to preference voting, giving many choices to order: 1st, 2nd, 3rd etc choice. Likewise, a majority count is only the most limited kind of majority count, offering one majority of over half the votes in a single member constituency. There is a certain proportional count (called the Droop quota) which offers many majorities in a multi-member constituency. With a two member constituency, two candidates are elected on a quota of one third the votes each, thus proportionly representing two- thirds of the constituents. With STV, a two member constituency is of two majorities over a remainder of up to a third the votes going unrepresented. Three members represent three-quarters the constituents: three majorities over the remaining constituents of up to a quarter, who still go unrepresented. This is an essential but over-looked fact about electoral counting: With STV, a proportional count is a many-majorities count over a residual minority. Majority counting, so-called, is just one-majority counting in a single member constituency. STV is a rationalisation of the (over-all) majority system, making for fairer or more equal representation. http://www.citizensassembly.gov.on.ca/documents/633024516305177500_OntarioCA_0.html (3 of 26)02/01/2007 11:23:37 AM Vote STV elections not single-member exclusions. With STV, a proportional count is a multi-majority count. There is no reasonable basis for treating majority and proportion in terms of two kinds of system, the Single-member and List systems, or as combinations of system, like the Mixed and Parallel systems. Supporters of the Mixed Member Proportional system assure you it is easy to understand. Evidence, from all the countries where MMP is used, that many people do not understand the Mixed system, owes to the unreasonableness of a mixed-up system, not of mixed-up people. 3 & 4: Representatives per electoral district & their geographical size. As constituencies get proportionately bigger, they represent more majorities relative to the residual wasted votes of less than the quota. Diminishing returns do set in, so a five-member constituency, giving a proportional representation of at least five-sixths of the voters, or some eighty-three per cent, is often considered by reformers as fair enough, without becoming too remote from local boundaries. Even the odd nine-member constituency, given that voters rank at least their nine most prefered candidates, is only going to improve the representation to at least ninety per cent of voters. The British Columbia Citizens Assembly report retained a minimum of proportionality in a few two member constituencies for its most vast wildernesses. Also recommended was a two member constituency for its nomadic original inhabitants. Whereas, the densest electorates might have unitary urban constituencies of more than five members, with perhaps as many as seven or eight members. Four to six seats would make up the bulk of the constituencies. Being more densely populated than BC, Ontario might want a higher average PR than recommended for BC by their Citizens Assembly. Michael Bednarski (1068) submitted a sample map of STV constituencies for Ontario, averaging about seven members. (I support his arguments in his separate submission 1179.) Quite rightly, his draft had caveats, but it was interesting that the smallest constituency was of three members and there were not many of those.