If
you wanted more proof of the Wisdom of Crowds, you got it last week
when the Citizens' Assembly of BC, a representative group of 153
citizens selected at random from the voter rolls to identify the best
electoral system for that province's voters, issued its report
on Thursday. By an overwhelming 90% plurality, the Citizens Assembly
selected a system called PR-STV, which stands for Proportional
Representation through Single Transferable Vote. Their recommendation
will be put to a vote in a referendum as part of next Spring's
provincial election, and the ruling government has agreed in advance
that if it is approved, PR-STV will come into effect in the following
election in 2009. The opposition NDP, which has been a long-time
supporter of PR, is almost certain to agree to be bound by the results
if they are elected in the Spring election as well. The only real
question now is whether existing power groups will lobby hard enough to
convince the people to defeat the resolution.
PR-STV is a little known voting system used in Ireland, Malta and parts
of Australia that combines elements of two other voting systems:
Proportional Representation with Closed Party List (PR-CPL), the system
used in much of Europe in which citizens vote for a party, and the top
names on each party's slate are elected in proportion to the percentage
of votes each party receives; and Instant Runoff (or Alternative)
Voting, in which citizens rank the candidates for office in their
constituency, the candidate with the lowest votes is dropped off and
that candidate's votes are transferred to their voters' second choice,
continuing until one candidate accumulates a clear majority of the
votes.
PR-STV is an attempt to accomplish three things reasonably well; and
while other systems accomplish each better, no other system even
attempts to achieve them all:
- Elected candidates are representative of and responsible to specific geographic constituencies
- Parties receive seats in government proportional to their share of overall popular vote
- Small, new parties have a reasonable chance of electing at least one candidate
This is a difficult balancing act. PR-STV requires larger
constituencies than the first-past-the-post system we in North America
are accustomed to. It isn't fully proportional: A party with a
plurality (more than any other party) but minority (<50%) of the
popular vote can still end up with a small majority of seats, and new
parties must have significant support (at least 20%) if they hope to
get candidates elected. Still, PR-STV does get much closer to the 'perfect compromise'
of the three objectives above, than any other system. In a recent study
for the Blair government in the UK, whose fragile majority would
disappear under PR-STV, the commission clearly recognized the
superiority of this system over any other (and in the UK, at various
levels, there are many options to choose from). More importantly, the
commission's report shows that PR-STV works in practice, and does so
with a ballot for voters that's 'as easy as 1-2-3'.
Here's how it works:
- The country, state or province is broken up into logical
urban and rural agglomerations, with homogeneous economic
characteristics and conforming to existing municipal boundaries (no
gerrymandering allowed). The population of each agglomeration is
computed and each is assigned a number of seats proportional to its
percentage of the total number of eligible voters, so that the total
number of seats remains unchanged. Any agglomeration with fewer than
three seats by this calculation is combined with the closest similar
agglomeration, and any agglomeration with more than seven seats by this
calculation is split into two or more agglomerations, consistent with
existing municipal boundaries, until each agglomeration has between 3
and 7 seats, These agglomerations become the electoral constituencies
for PR-STV.
- Each party can nominate candidates up to the number of
seats for grabs in each constituency. The ballot looks something like
the picture above: candidates of each party in a column, with both the
candidates of each party and the parties printed in random order from
ballot to ballot (easy for printers to do in this day and age). The
instructions on the PR-STV ballot are shown on the example above.
- Voters enter a 1 in the circle for their top choice, 2 for
their second choice etc. They can rank all candidates in order, or rank
fewer, or even just one, if they wish.
- Here's where it gets complicated, and fair.
The quota for election is the number of ballots cast, divided by (the
number of seats to be filled +1). For example, if 180,000 ballots are
cast in the constituency, and 5 candidates are to be elected from the
15 on the ballot above, the quota is 180,000/6 = 30,000 votes. Any
candidate who achieves the quota in first-choice ('1') votes is
declared elected.
- Next, the second choice votes of those candidates who
exceeded the quota are tabulated, and reallocated to the remaining
candidates in proportion to the number of votes in excess of the quota.
So if a candidate gets 45,000 '1' votes, each of that candidate's
second choices receive 1/3 of a vote for each '2' vote they received,
and the total of these 15,000 transferred votes are subtracted from
that candidate, reducing his total to exactly the quota.
- Once all votes in excess of the quota have been transferred
in this manner, if there still aren't enough candidates who have
reached the quota (five in our example), then one by one, the
candidates with the lowest accumulated votes are dropped off, and their
second (or third, fourth etc. if their second choice has already been
elected or eliminated) choices are reallocated to the remaining
candidates.
Here's
an example of how the ballot counting under PR-STV would work, courtesy
of the UK Electoral Reform Society (another organization that speaks
highly of PR-STV). If you want to play around with it, there's a
computer program that registers all your test votes and does all the
calculations for you here.
I've tried it, and it works, as long as you have a reasonalbly large
number of voters in your test. And it's really hard to explot to a
party's advantage: If a major party publishes lists telling party
members what order to list its 3-7 candidates in, that can backfire and
put the lower-ranking candidates on their list out of contention before
the second and third-place votes get counted.
What are the drawbacks of this system? Other than the less-than-perfect
way it addresses each of the three objectives bulleted above, these are
the criticisms and challenges:
- Elected officials need to be more focused on the needs of
their constituency; a major party nomination isn't enough to ensure a
win. As far as I'm concerned, if they have to neglect their
constituency to focus on 'larger' issues, they don't deserve to be
elected.
- Under PR-STV, majority governments are rare, so coalitions
are needed to pass legislation. Experience indicates, however, that
minority governments are more responsive and responsible to voters,
less likely to take extreme positions, and just as able to act
decisively when an emergency arises.
- Politicians hate it, and politicians with safe seats under
the current system will probably do everything they can to sabotage its
introduction. They'd actually have to work to be re-elected.
- There are concerns that the ballot is too complicated for
voters to understand. I don't get this concern -- if a voter can't
write 1, 2, 3... in order of preference then they probably aren't
capable of voting. I have greater concerns that the tabulation
algorithm, or any machine-readable ballot, could be tampered with: It
would be essential to use paper ballots and take the time to count them
manually. If it takes an extra day, so be it -- better than taking an
extra month or two to deal with disputes over irregularities. I'm sure
the areas that have been using PR-STV for years can give us some
pointers. Canada uses manually-counted paper ballots, and election
results here come out faster than they do in the US.
- One concern I have is that wingnuts with a hard core of
15-20% support in their constituency could end up being elected under
PR-STV, and even holding the balance of power in a coalition, but I
guess that's the cost of true democracy; I'm sure some people would
have the same concerns about my friends in the Green Party.
If this summer's Canadian election had been conducted using PR-STV, the
Liberal minority would have been even smaller than it was, but the
separatist Bloc Québecois would have won many
fewer seats, and the Liberals and NDP, along with a handful of Green
Party electees, would be able to govern as a coalition without the need
for support from either the anti-federalist Conservatives or Bloc
Québecois. The opposition parties all favour some form of electoral
reform for Canada, and the NDP has made a referendum on reform a
condition of its continued support for the Liberals. The BC report is
likely to give this national initiative tremendous momentum, and make
PR-STV the preferred alternative for consideration for the country as a
whole.
If the 2000 US election had been conducted using PR-STV, Gore would be
president (there's no room for an anachronistic electoral college under
PR-STV), since he would have received the lion's share of second-place
votes when Nader was eliminated. Democrats would probably also have won
more seats than Republicans in Congress (which under PR-STV would be
combined into a single 'House'), though it's possible that some third
parties and independents would have held the balance of power, reining
in the House from some of its more flagrantly partisan and
pork-barrelling actions. What's more important, a lot of the old hacks
would have been turfed out in favour of more moderate, competent
candidates from their own party, bringing new ideas, youth and
collaboration to the House.
The study for the Blair government looked at the entire history of various PR voting around the world. Here's what they found:
- 94% of PR-STV voters voted for more than one candidate; 8% ranked all the candidates
- 81% 'split' their vote, voting for candidates of more than one party; 49% voted for candidates of three or more parties
- PR-STV did foment some intra-party feuds, with older,
established candidates objecting to having to run against younger
candidates with new ideas from their own party (heh, heh, poor guys)
- Contrary to expectations, alas, PR-STV had no significant impact on voter turnout
I know it's hard for Americans to think about electoral reform with the
critical election pending next week. But I predict that, whoever is
ultimately declared the winner in that election, controversy,
litigation and acrimony will ensue for months, even years. The sad
truth is that the US electoral system is simply incapable of accurately
reflecting the will of the electorate, either in the vote for president
or the votes for Congress. If Americans finally wake up after a second
consecutive electoral debacle and vow "never again", modern electoral
systems like PR-STV that are immune to most of the abuses that have
destroyed the credibility of the American system, might merit a closer
look.
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