First Past the Post Post

So . . . the Canadian electoral campaign is still raging (an overstatement I know, but the 12-year-old in me gets a kick out of "raging election") with the debates scheduled for tomorrow and Wednesday.  The French-language debate was supposed to be Thursday, but because more people care about the Bruins-Habs playoff game scheduled for that night, they moved the debate.  Today is part three of my election "coverage" (so quotated because I haven't really be covering the election so much as commenting on marginal issues) and the topic of the day is our electoral system. 

Unlike most Canadians, I actually don't mind our first-past-the-post system (most Canadians don't really care, and those that do tend to hate it).  For those unfamiliar with Canadian election rules, the system divides Canada into 308 (grossly unequal) consituencies, and each elects a candidate.  The issue that many have with the current system is that the candidates who receives the most votes, regardless of whether that constitutes a majority, wins the riding, and the party with the most ridings won (again, majority or not) wins control of parliament and their leader becomes Prime Minister.  If you add to this our 3-5 national parties, majorities within ridings (and in the past decade, within parliament) are almost nonexistent.  This favors the larger parties and makes it harder for smaller parties with broad but not deep support (like my favorite whipping posts, the Green party) to gain representation in government.

But personally, I'd rather have more majority governments, even if they are based on minority support.  The party that wins still has more support than any of the losing parties.  And the alternatives are far worse.  For example, the US electoral college is even more likely to return a majority-by-minority result, if there ever were more than two parties running. 

Representation by population (or rep by pop, though that sounds vaguely criminal or sexual; e.g. "Albert Anastasia of Murder Incorporated built his rep by pop", or "Wilt Chamberlain, who supposedly had sex with 10,000 women certainly made his rep pop by pop") is terrible, as it gives overrepresentation to smaller parties and leads to fractured governments.  While I concede that it does the best job of representing the overall wishes of the populace, that has to be balanced with providing an effective government.  After all, a true democracy would entail all citizens voting on all issues, which is so unwieldy as to be non-functioning, and I don't see rep by pop as much different than that.  Furthermore, with rep by pop you are voting for a party, not a representative, and in that way it is further from true democracy.

One system gaining popularity is Single Transferrable Vote, or STV (which sounds like something that someone who built their rep by pop might contract).  The goal of this system is to minimize wasted votes, i.e. those votes that are for a candidate who either a) has enough votes already or b) has no chance of winning.  I first heard about wasted votes back in high school, and my reaction now is the same as it was back then: suck it up.  You make your choice of who to vote for.  If you vote for a losing candidate, your vote doesn't get a second life.  If you vote for a landslide candidate, who is to say that it is your vote that is surplus and not someone else's?  No vote is wasted, just some are for a winner and the others are not.

If I were to advocate for a change from first past the post, it would be for a system of my own devising that takes into account what has come to be the typical thought process of a voter.  It seems that more and more people are voting for the least terrible candidate, and not their preferred candidate.  So I advocate the three-vote system.  Under this method, each person has three votes that they can cast for or against any candidate.  Hate the NDP?  Use all three against, and they will nullify three votes for.  Like the Liberals and dislike the Conservatives?  Split up your three into some red and some against blue.  The only flaw I see in this method is that the Greens would probably win, because the 5% of people that love them would use all of their votes for them, and no one else would care enough about them to vote against.  So maybe this isn't such a good system after all.