ReeferMadness

I wonder how they'd feel if they didn't vote strategically and Harper was back in.

There were a couple of different organizations promoting SV. In addition, there were different websites that showed differing poll numbers for the same ridings. Some ridings (Edmonton Centre is a good example) prompted arguments over which candidate was best positioned to challenge the incumbent. And then there were the parties. The Green Party was dead against SV (because it lost votes in almost all cases) and the NDP was mostly against it. So, for strategic voting to be really effective, you need a single organization and good polling. LeadNow did (I thought) quite a principled and thorough job but even they were criticized. They got people to commit to SV, crowd-sourced money to poll ridings and allowed people to vote on which candidate would be endorsed as the preferred strategic candidate. However, information wasn't perfect and in some cases they took some criticism over that.

Has anyone suggested Doug Ford?

In case anyone is interested, FVC has a faq page which addresses concerns with PR.

*No* system will provide "strictly proportional" results except direct democracy. All systems are a trade-off between proportionality, local representation and degree of party control. And you can improve the proportionality of systems by increasing the overall number of representatives (which is generally off the table when voting system reform is discussed). So, if you just want to maximize proportionality, you would choose a pure party list system with a single nation-wide list. The voters would instantly reject it because it gives too much control to the party and no guarantee of local representation. Different implementations of MMP and STV address these trade-offs differently. In general, you sacrifice proportionality as you improve local representation and vice versa. The results under STV are completely unknowable because you have no idea what the second choices would have been. In fact, they are unknowable under any proportional system because changing the voting system would change strategic voting behavior.

Eric was absolutely wrong. Sorry if I sound crank, I get tired of repeatedly correcting this statement. And even Eric corrected his own mistake. STV provides proportional results providing you have ridings with sufficient magnitude. I've read books that say 7 is the sweet spot between proportionality and ridings that get unwieldy but even with 5, you get much better proportionality than FPTP.

This is theoretically possible if you have a huge number of parties, all of which have considerable voting percentages. In that case, the people who have the most votes after the process is completed win. Does that happen? I've never seen anything that indicates it happens often enough to be a problem. What happens in first past the post in the case of a tie? That's also theoretically possible but I've never heard of it actually happening.

You could argue that an open list system gives you more choice than you have today. Today, if you want to vote for a party, you have a choice of exactly one person.

The number of names on the ballot is irrelevant. Only the magnitude of the STV riding is important. Here.

This kind of got overshadowed by the election but in September, over 500 Canadian academics, including several Fellows of the Royal Society of Canada, 29 Canada Research Chairs and two Professors with the Order of Canada, called on all political parties to work together to bring in a proportional electoral system. Fair Vote Canada is a non-partisan, grassroots organization devoted to voting system reform.

I'm not sure what his suggest was but I'm a little leery of Grenier suggesting a voting system. In his original writeup, he erroneously said that STV wasn't a proportional system (maybe he confused it with AV). This is pretty fundamental mistake so I have to question his expertise. There's a guy named Wilf Day in Ontario who seems to be something of an expert. Also, Dr Dennis Pilon, a political scientist, has written books on PR.

What do you mean by mathematically guaranteed? Do you think Toad and I just made this up ourselves?

We already have tons of safe seats, MMP wouldn't change that.

Personally, I prefer STV to MMP; but I prefer any proportional system to non-proportional systems.

Typically, the list candidates can be open list (you choose a person from the party list) or closed list (you choose the party and the party decides in what order the candidates are selected). To do what you're suggesting could mean that candidates who did very poorly in their own ridings could suddenly be MP's.

In STV, you rank candidates. You can rank as many as the number of MPs in that riding; so in a 5 member riding, you can rank from 1 to 5. In MMP, you get 2 votes, 1 for you local candidate and 1 for the party. In an open list system, you would choose a person for the party vote.

Not true. As I described above, the number of votes required is ((1/m+1)*t)+1 where m is the district magnitude and t is the total number of votes. Even in a 9 member riding, you would need 10%+1 vote to be elected. The number of names on the ballot is irrelevant.

I'm not sure if there is any system in existence that allows candidates to be both local and list candidates but it's probably possible. ETA: NDP is proposing MMP.

So, if you don't like closed party lists, that's a common complaint; but it's not a reason to reject open party lists.

That's what happens when you need a real majority to have a legitimate government. Not a majority like we have today where a "majority' is made up of 40% of eligible voters. It really has nothing to do with PR per se.

That's true and it's a good point. The excess votes are distributed according to 2nd choice until a second winner is picked. And it goes on until you have a full list of chosen candidates.

It is a silly distinction - nobody would describe it that way. That's not true. In our current system, the party picks the candidate and then we vote for them. In a party list system, the party has a list of candidates and then we vote for them. The difference is that in MMP, the list MP's are used specifically to make the results more proportional.

You seem to be describing mixed member proportional (MMP). It's a hybrid between FPTP and party list. The list candidates are used to make the final number of MP's in each party more proportional.

You stipulated nobody elected with less than 10%. In a 7 member riding, you need 12.5%+1vote. And since the riding would be 7 times as big, that's more votes than most MP's will get today. If an average riding is 100,000 votes, than an STV riding would be 700,000 votes. 700,000*12.5% is 87,500 votes, more than almost any MP gets today.

The problem with voting system reform is that people who have little understanding of electoral systems immediately come up with blanket statements like this one. Voting systems should be a mandatory part of curriculum in school. There are two types of party lists, open and closed. Open party lists allow voters to select individuals from the list as well as the party. Closed lists are when the party chooses the order in which the candidates are chosen to reach the party's share of the vote. In addition to open vs closed, lists can be regional or national.