The Blogs Have Spoken
The way I figure, one factor to consider in making a decision on whether to vote yes or not is to consider what decision other, ordinary people have come to after thinking about the problem. Of course one such group of people was the Citizen's Assembly itself, a group of 160 randomly selected B.C. residents who studied electoral systems for over a year and at the end of their work held 3 votes:
October 23, 2004: Which of the two alternatives would best serve British Columbia?
MMP - 31, STV - 123.
October 24, 2004: Do we recommend retaining the current First-Past-the-Post electoral system in British Columbia?
YES - 11, NO 142.
October 24, 2004: Do we recommend the STV (BC-STV) system to the people in a referendum on May 17, 2005
YES 146, NO 7.
Another group of people who probably pay a little more attention to politics than the average citizen are bloggers. I've been keeping a running count of blogs in favour / neutral / opposed (as you can see on the sidebar on the right). I've just added links for any blogs I came across or saw linked anywhere, supplemented by regular google searches for 'STV' + 'blog' and so on as well as technorati searches for 'STV' and 'Single Transferable Vote'. As far as I know, there wasn't any inherent bias in my method, at least not a significant one.
Anyway, as you can tell by my sidebar, bloggers are overwhelmingly in favour of a 'yes' vote with 49 in favour, 13 opposed and 13 neutral (the neutral includes some group blogs which can't really be said to have a position one way or the other since members of the blog may disagree).
Just one more piece of evidence that when you sit down and think about the alternatives, STV - with fairer results and more choice for voters - just makes a lot more sense than keeping the old First Past the Post system.
October 23, 2004: Which of the two alternatives would best serve British Columbia?
MMP - 31, STV - 123.
October 24, 2004: Do we recommend retaining the current First-Past-the-Post electoral system in British Columbia?
YES - 11, NO 142.
October 24, 2004: Do we recommend the STV (BC-STV) system to the people in a referendum on May 17, 2005
YES 146, NO 7.
Another group of people who probably pay a little more attention to politics than the average citizen are bloggers. I've been keeping a running count of blogs in favour / neutral / opposed (as you can see on the sidebar on the right). I've just added links for any blogs I came across or saw linked anywhere, supplemented by regular google searches for 'STV' + 'blog' and so on as well as technorati searches for 'STV' and 'Single Transferable Vote'. As far as I know, there wasn't any inherent bias in my method, at least not a significant one.
Anyway, as you can tell by my sidebar, bloggers are overwhelmingly in favour of a 'yes' vote with 49 in favour, 13 opposed and 13 neutral (the neutral includes some group blogs which can't really be said to have a position one way or the other since members of the blog may disagree).
Just one more piece of evidence that when you sit down and think about the alternatives, STV - with fairer results and more choice for voters - just makes a lot more sense than keeping the old First Past the Post system.
posted by Declan at
9:09 AM
2 Comments:
Interesting. Lately I've been wondering something that you might know about - why STV? It's clearly better than FPP in terms of representation, but my cursory look into voting theory indicates that it may well be the second-worst option. The Wikipedia page on voting theory doesn't address it explicitly, but mentions Instant Runoff Voting, which is the one-seat version of STV - and IRV violates just about every criterion voting theorists are looking to satisfy. So - any idea why the Citizens' Assembly chose STV instead of some other alternative? I've still voted yes on STV, but I wish we could vote on a larger choice of voting systems. Of course, once we have more than two options, there are a variety of ways to vote on them...
(Been enjoying your blogs immensely lately, BTW.)
By
Anonymous, at 9:28 PM
At risk of wildly generalizing, STV generally seems to be favoured in countries which come from an individualist British tradition (Ireland, Scotland, Australia, New Zealand, Malta and now maybe Canada are all former British possessions) rather than a collectivist European tradition.
STV is the only real way to incorporate proportional results without formally making parties a part of the electoral system.
Aside from formalizing the role of parties in the electoral system, other proportional systems (such as MMP or Pure List PR) tend to dilute geographic representation and don't offer independents a legitimate role in the system.
I suspect you would only see STV being proposed in Alberta or B.C. since these two provinces (IMO) have very individualistic, independent cultures. Anywhere further east, MMP is likely to be the system proposed.
STV is also generally harder on small parties than most other PR systems (although this doesn't have to be the case) and I think British cultures (for whatever reason) seem to be more paranoid about giving a voice to small parties.
On a more practical level, the constraint of not being able to add more seats to the legislature which was placed on the assembly (unreasonably IMO) probably worked against MMP as well since it is tough to make MMP-type systems work without diluting georgraphic representation or adding more MP's.
The members of the Citizen's Assembly I've heard talk about it suggested that as a result any proposed MMP type system for B.C. would have been overly complex.
--
(thanks!)
By
Declan, at 3:47 PM
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