Casting ballots

Re: Shouldn’t every riding be a ‘battleground’?, Andrew Coyne, Sept. 13

I disagree with Andrew Coyne and believe that under proportional representation, political parties are even less accountable to the electorate than under our current system.

Proportional representation replaces local, riding-by-riding electoral contests with a single national one, in which parliamentary deputies are selected from predetermined party lists in numbers proportionate to that party’s popular vote. Under this scheme, voters are denied the right to elect their local representatives directly, much less to vote into office a party-unaffiliated independent.

These same parties then decide among themselves, during completely opaque backroom wheeling and dealing, which of them will enter the ruling coalition and, finally, what policies they will actually pursue once the ruling coalition is cobbled together. This may happen weeks, even months, after election day (a staggering 589 days in the case of Belgium’s 2010 vote), during which time the ship of state is essentially rudderless.

This unwieldy system of government formation is always in danger of collapsing when one of its constituent parties does not get its way on some pet policy and walks out, triggering either new elections or another round of backroom wheeling and dealing with one or more parties left outside the original coalition. Far from voters telling the parties what to do, voters are left on the sidelines merely watching what the parties do. Some democracy!

The simple tweak of a ranked ballot would address all of Coyne’s complaints about first past the post, while ensuring that radical fringe elements, unable to win a majority or plurality of votes in any single riding, are never granted electoral legitimacy and, worse, a legislative seat through the pseudo-democratic chicanery of proportional representation. Edward Ozog, Brantford, Ont.