Instant-runoff voting in Canada (circa 1951)

Curious about how this whole recent attempt at proportional representation started, I went looking through our history books and found, to my surprise, that we had it back in 1951. Dr. Ben Isitt’s The Ghost of Elections Past explains.

The 1950s was a period of social and political flux. The Liberals and Conservatives had formed a Coalition government a decade earlier, after the CCF won the most votes in a general election. […] The final act of co-operation between the Liberals and Conservatives was passage of the Provincial Elections Act Amendment Act, introducing the transferable vote in the spring 1951 legislative session. Both parties had endorsed the voting system at conventions in the 1940s. […] The Liberals expected to receive second preferences of Conservative voters, while Conservatives expected to be ranked second by Liberal voters.

In short, they figured they had the popular vote, but would stand to lose their seats due to vote splitting, one of the side effects of the first-past-the-post system. By switching to the instant-runoff voting system, they thought they would maintain their seats. What they didn’t seem to count on was that the Social Credit party had the popular vote and won out over the previous coalition in the subsequent election.

Social Credit – untested and untainted in the legislature – edged out the CCF, 19 seats to 18. The Liberals and Conservatives fell to six and four seats respectively. W.A.C. Bennett became premier with a minority Social Credit government. The next spring, he engineered his defeat in the legislature, won a majority mandate in a snap election, and promptly repealed the Provincial Elections Act changes. British Columbia returned to the old first-past-the-post voting system that prevails to this day.

Once the Social Credit party had the majority, they revoked the electoral reform. While it was put in place for self-serving reasons, IRV is a fairer electoral system (not perfect, but fairer). Bennett’s motivations aren’t detailed in the linked article and I don’t know if they’re documented anywhere, but the effect is the same.

Further reading

• History and use of the Single Transferable Vote in British Columbia
• History and use of instant-runoff voting in Canada

An idea for proportional representation

So we have this issue about riding sizes and how we make voter representative power proportional. The proposed solution in BC-STV was to amalgamate ridings and modify the number of representatives accordingly. On one hand, this balances the representatives with the population. On the other, smaller communities are unlikely to have anyone representing their issues. We can’t just split larger ridings up again and again, so what can we do?

One idea I’ve been batting around to keep the ridings the same size, but scale each single representatives’ voting power based on the their riding’s population at the time of the election. Sounds a little complicated at first, but let’s consider an example to clarify.

We have two adjacent ridings, one with 100 constituents and one with 50. Those in the smaller teal riding don’t want to be amalgamated for fear of losing their voice to two yellow-based representatives. Those in the yellow riding feel their voices are heard at half-volume as they have has as many representatives per person. Redrawing the line between yellow and teal doesn’t represent the reality of the geographic locales. So what do we do?

Instead of each representative having one vote in their legislature or what have you, the yellow representative would have 100 and the teal would have 50. This way the local issues of the teal riding are still voiced and the yellow constituents are represented proportionally.

I don’t know if there’s a name for this kind of system, but it could work fairly well at both the provincial and federal levels. Combined with a Condorcet method per riding, we could have a form of proportional representation that addresses the concerns with BC-STV.

Known issues

• If 51% of voters in each riding vote for party A and 49% vote for party B, we have a bit of an issue as the representatives are pretty far off from the popular vote. Voting reform helps mitigate this, but it’s still a concern.
• If a representative won their riding with 51% of the vote, they have the same voting power as a representative that won with 100% (assuming equal populations). I’m not fully convinced that this is bad just yet, but it’s worth looking at.
• The system doesn’t and can’t address how to get it in place over the current voting system. If the party in power stands to lose the most seats and also gets to set the bar for popular support, we’re somewhat boned.

Update

Turns out this notion is fairly similar to the population-weighted representation as put forth by James Madison in the Virginia Plan of 1787. It only differs in that Madison’s plan had two representatives for the yellow riding with one vote each, whereas mine has one representative with a voting power of 100.

Electoral districts

One of the arguments I heard against BC-STV was that the proposed electoral districts would take away voting power from smaller communities. With a small example, I think we can illustrate how that additional power is sometimes horribly unfair. Take the following ridings and their associated population sizes as an example:

• Surrey-Tynehead: 59k
• North Coast: 27k
• Peace River South: 28k

Because of how riding borders are drawn and population sizes change, Surrey-Tynehead has a greater population than North Coast and Peace River South combined, but half the number of representatives. Each person in the smaller ridings effectively has twice the voting power of those in the larger riding.

To take the example to an extreme, suppose each city in BC had its own riding with a single representative each. Would that be fair considering Vancouver has a disproportionate population in comparison to the rest of the cities?

One of solutions to this problem is to amalgamate smaller ridings with single representatives into larger ones with multiple representatives. The number of representatives could then change yearly as the population grows or shrinks (possible with BC-STV, but not under our current system). That seems fair to me, but I suppose 61% of British Columbians disagree.

BC-STV rejected by BC

I find it difficult to believe that BC-STV didn’t pass, especially considering preliminary polling showed a 65% support for it. Still, it’s not happening and it likely won’t for a long time. So these results? The skewing of seats won to popular vote? Yeah, get used to it.

I get that proportional voting isn’t to the majority’s liking; The leading party will always stand to lose the most in any form of proportional representation. With a requirement for 60% support, it’s unlikely we’ll ever move away from FPTP. Frustration.

Argue in good faith

The following is a quote from nostv.org, a site arguing against BC-STV.

Proponents say because STV it is more proportional “overall” if is a fairer system. But a candidate in a two-member riding in northern BC can get elected with 33.3% public support while a Capital Region candidate can get elected with just 12.5% of the votes cast. This means some MLAs have had to win far more support than others to be elected to the BC Legislature.

At first, this sounds horribly unfair, but consider the following scenario. Let’s say we have Riding A with 1000 people and 1 elected representative and Riding B with 2000 people and 2 elected representatives. Riding A representatives require 50% of the vote, whereas representatives in Riding B require 25%. The percentages are different, but both still require 500 votes to win.

To say that these percentages are unfair is disingenuous to the argument. Preying on poor mathematical intuition? Come on now. Try raising a more legitimate argument: STV results in representation that more closely reflects the popular vote, but results in minority governance.

Disadvantages of the plurality voting system

I won’t go into my specific concerns with Canada’s voting system as they’re well documented on Wikipedia, but I would like to illustrate my frustration with our 2008 election as an example.

Maybe we can look at some alternatives?