Angry in the Great White North

In British Columbia, the referendum on Single Transferable Vote has been held, and fewer than 40% of voters have voted to change from the First-Past-the-Post.

That's great news.

When Ontario voters were considering a switch to Mixed Member Proportional, I argued against it for the same reason that STV is a bad idea.  Unlike FPTP, these systems increase what I called "electoral noise".

STV essentially works like this.  Super-sized ridings are represented by multiple legislators.  Say the riding is assigned two seats, being vied for by three candidates from parties A, B, and C.  To win a seat, the candidate must earn X votes, the threshold X being calculated based on the Droop Quota formula.  On voting night, candidate A earns X+Y votes.  The Y excess is removed from A's column and distributed to B and C, based on a second preference indicated on the ballots.  The second seat is assigned to either B or C should one then exceed the threshold. 

Which votes are re-allocated out of the pool of votes originally won by candidate A?  It is essentially a random decision.  Or if not exactly random, then certainly inscrutable.  Who knows?  STV is complex and weird and difficult to explain.

And what is the result of all these interacting formulae and rankings and repeated re-examination of ballots?  A fractionalization of the legislature by making it more likely that fringe parties, like the Green Party, that seem to find it impossible to construct a platform that can survive the vetting process of FPTP are awarded seats nevertheless.

Let me defend FPTP one more time.  Each riding is a mix of citizens.  Some ridings are more rural than others, some demographically younger than others, some more industrial-based, economically speaking, than others.  But no riding is purely one thing or another. 

That poses a challenge to parties.  They must construct platforms that are both distinctive from the platforms offered by their opponents, but that are still broadly appealing.  A platform that appeals to one slice of voters will never result in a riding win, since no seat is likely to have a plurality of such voters.

Take the Green Party as a example.  The Green Party is a one-issue party, with every platform plank designed around environmental concerns.  Who does this appeal to?  Green Party voters are overwhelmingly upper middle class consumers who feel guilt over their rampant consumerism, and who want to assuage their guilt by the symbolic action of pounding a Green Party sign on their pesticide-soaked golf-green quality lawns.

The Green Party can win 500,000 votes or 750,000 votes or 1,000,000 votes in an election, in large part because of support from guilt-ridden upper middle class fair-weather environmentalists.  But there is no riding where this particular demographic forms a plurality.   To win a riding, a Green Party candidate has to be backed by a platform that appeals to guilt-ridden upper middle class fair-weather environmentalists (their core voters) as well as the elderly, farmers, students, single people, people who work in factories, people with large families, office workers, and so on and so forth.  Heck, in Canada, even prisoners vote.

The Green Party has consistently failed to do this.  That is the strength of FPTP.  Fringe platforms with thin limited support are filtered out by the voting process.  Systems like MMP and STV are designed to deliberately to eliminate this most excellent feature of FPTP.  The result is legislators holding fractionalized legislatures hostage to their tiny demands.

That's why I call this "noise".  Imagine government as an electric motor.  If the power supply is noisy, with every spike and dip in voltage being applied, the motor will speed up and slow down randomly and frequently, making the motor useless.  Power supplies are filtered to eliminate what engineers call noise.  That makes the engine run smoothly.  The only signal changes that come through are the ones that exceed the filtering threshold.

Yesterday, voters in BC rejected STV by a large margin:

Shouting over the noise of a late-night powerwasher on Georgia Street, NO STV advocate Bill Tieleman held an impromptu, election night press conference to announce the demise of the latest plan for BC electoral reform.

"STV is dead, that much is clear," he said, flanked by fellow NO STV operative Rick Dignard. "The change that was proposed was just plain wrong. You might even say, we cleaned up."

It was 10:30 p.m., and with over half a million votes already counted, the NO forces in favour of keeping the existing electoral system had earned over 60 per cent of the popular vote. It was enough for No STV to announce that BC voters had rejected STV for the second consecutive time.

Of course, for people who claim to defend democracy, this vote is meaningless.  They will demand referendum after referendum until they win, and then move to STV with no chance of going back to FPTP in the future:

"I'm surprised," said, Arjun Singh, an executive member of BC STV, staring into a giant TV screen. "This time around, people couldn't get their heads around some of the nuances of STV. But we'll keep working ..we have [established] such a huge grass roots group all across the province."

Yet I doubt there will be a third vote in the near future.  And with MMP failing in Ontario in 2007, the likelihood is that FPTP is safe for the time being, both in BC and across Canada.

Too bad for the Green Party.  I guess they'll have to figure out how to distinguish themselves from the Liberals, the Conservatives, and the NDP with a fourth distinctive and yet broadly appealing platform.

That'll be hard to do.  Perhaps even impossible given the Green Party's narrow environmental focus.  But then that's the whole point.  It should be hard to do.  The bar is set high.  The filtering effect of FPTP is unforgiving.  The result is better governance.