On October 10, I’m voting in the referendum on electoral reform.

A Mixed Member Proportional system gives you more choice. Your ballot gives you two votes. You vote for the party of your choice and also for the local candidate you prefer. You can vote for a local candidate from a different party if you prefer. A Mixed Member Proportional system makes election results fairer. The share of seats a party wins is roughly equal to its share of the party vote. If a party gets 25% of the vote, it wins about 25% of the seats in the legislature. In Ontario’s current system (often called “First Past the Post”), the legislature does not reflect the way people actually voted. Rarely is a majority government elected with a majority of voter support – this has not happened since 1937. In the current system a party can win many votes yet end up having few seats, or no seats.

Do we have local representation?  Yes.  103 seats for 103 districts.  and 24 [?] seats allocated so the proportion of seats going to a party reflects the popular vote.  (This will increase the # of MPPs to the same # they were before 1996 [?].  That’s not a waste – MPPs will not be so thinly spread over many committees and portfolios.)

J’s note: Conversely, a party can win 35% of the votes yet end up having 80% of the seats. (4 years ago I researched this in depth, but I can’t find my article, which had many similar historical incidents of bizarre election results due to our current system.)

No more “Strategic Voting”. Strategic Voting is when people want to vote for one party, but vote for another party because they don’t want a 3rd party to get in. This makes people cynical about politics. Electoral reform will render strategic voting obsolete.

Andrew Coyne shows how the current system hurts all parties in his article “The Case Against First-Past-the-Post”.

He’s brilliant off the top and every paragraph gets better.

Democracy, as everyone knows, is a system of majority rule. It is a system marked by free and fair elections between rival political parties, their success or failure depending on the number of votes they can attract. It is a system in which every adult citizen has an equal say in choosing who should represent them. By every one of these definitions, Canada, under the electoral system in use today, is not a democracy. We are not governed by majorities, competition between parties is not free and fair, nor do their relative fortunes depend on their popularity with the voters. Most striking of all, we do not give every citizen equal say at election time. Everyone may get one vote, that is true. But some votes count more than others. Some — most, in fact — do not count at all. … Its supporters appeal to a sentiment of “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” But it is broke, and this is the opportunity to fix it. … In Ontario, an NDP government was elected with 37% of the vote. In British Columbia, the NDP won a majority of the seats in the 1996 election though it received less than 40% of the vote — not merely fewer than a majority, but fewer than its nearest rivals, the Liberals. … … Supporters of the status quo cite its tendency to produce stable majority governments. But these aren’t majority governments. They’re legalized coup d’etats. False majorities are but one of the distortions to which the present system gives rise. It is not unknown in this country for one party to take all or nearly all of the seats in the house, with 60% or less of the popular vote — as happened in B.C. in 2001, and New Brunswick in 1987. The 40% of the public or more who voted for other parties, with other philosophies, were effectively disenfranchised: entitled to vote, but not to representation. … … The 27% of Albertans who voted Liberal or NDP in 2006, but got no seats; the 38% of Ontarians who voted Conservative or Alliance in 2004, but got two seats; the majorities of Quebecers who voted for federalist parties in every election since 1993, only to see the Bloc Quebecois take a majority of the seats — how much different would our history have been had our electoral system not presented, time and time again, such a false picture of the country? … a party’s success depends not on now many votes it has overall, but how well it can bunch them geographically. Hence the Conservatives, in 1993, won 16% of the vote nationwide, and were rewarded with two seats, while the Reform party, with 18.7% of the vote, won 52 — two seats fewer than the Bloc was able to win, with just 13.5% of the vote. The result is, in democratic terms, chaos. Nobody knows what impact their vote will have, or how it will translate into seats. Indeed, they are often told they cannot even vote for the party of their choice, for fear of “splitting” the vote, but rather must vote for some other party, to stop yet a third from getting in. All we know with certainty is that some votes count for less than others — a lot less. Like in 2006, when 2.6 million federal NDP votes equalled 19 seats, but 1.6 million Bloc votes equalled 51 seats

(Coyne also wrote The conservative case for electoral reform, which I have not read.)

Nor have I read EYE WEEKLY City Editor Edward Keenan’s One Man Debating Society.

But I was challenged by EYE WEEKLY’s Editorial:

There is no guarantee the minority governments certain to result from the MMP system will be able to function as working coalitions rather than descending into squabbling paralysis. And despite the cocky reassurances of MMP supporters, the truth is that the “list candidates” will have no constituency save the leader who appointed them, giving more, not less, control over caucuses to the party machinery. Single-issue fringe parties could occasionally find themselves carrying disproportionately big sticks: imagine a situation in which the Family Coalition Party, with a handful of representatives, was in a position to prop up a Conservative government, and imposed as a condition of support new legislation restricting abortion.

To the last point, NOW Magazine countered:

Any party which propped itself up by agreeing to a fringe party’s demand for unpopular legislation would be severely punished in subsequent elections.

On another note, EYE WEEKLY suggests MacGuinty is Machiavelli:

Why have there been no televised debates about electoral reform? … Why is the government refusing to fund Yes and No campaigns for the referendum? Some would say it’s because the Liberals are the party that would likely be hurt most by MMP, since they’ve very often been over-represented in the current system. So this government gets to appear to do the right thing by holding a referendum, but gets to ensure the proposition’s defeat by refusing to fund any awareness of the issue. And when the proposition is defeated, the Liberals can safely say they did their best and forget the issue for another decade or two.

If we don’t approve the proposed new system (MMP), is the issue dead or can we have grown enough interest that we can consider alternatives, and then have another referendum in 4 years, or 2? If we do approve it, can we have another referendum in 4 years, or 2? Before Oct 10, I’ll search the Citizens Assembly’s website to find why they chose MMP over the alternatives.

I still expect to vote for it, but I would like to believe that there is a better alternative.

It seemed a good process:

——————– WHO WE ARE We are 103 citizens, selected at random, one from each of Ontario’s ridings. We are a cross-section of Ontario voters. The provincial government asked us to assess Ontario’s electoral system – the way votes translate into seats in the legislature for Members of Provincial Parliament (MPPs). The government asked us to recommend whether we should keep our current system or adopt a different one. We worked independently of government and political parties. WHAT WE DID For eight months, we studied voting systems and compared Ontario’s current system to others used around the world. We listened to what other Ontarians had to say, and discussed what we had learned and heard. We thought a lot about the values Ontario’s system should reflect.

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