All candidates must face voters

Dear editor: Your headline over William Stock’s letter “All parties will benefit from PR” (Courier, Jan. 17) is maybe truer than you intended. The parties will benefit, not necessarily the voters.

Mr. Stock and many others advocate MMP PR.

According to Wikipedia: Mixed-member proportional representation (MMP) is a mixed electoral system in which voters get two votes: one to decide the representative for their single-seat constituency, and one for a political party. Seats in the legislature are filled firstly by the successful constituency candidates, and secondly, by party candidates based on the percentage of nationwide votes that each party received.

This is a way to slip into the legislature party stalwarts who haven’t (and maybe couldn’t) received a single vote from the public at large. If we are to adopt PR (which I support) we need to find a way where every member has to face the voters publicly.

There are several ways of doing this, but in my view the fairest is the single transferable vote system, where all the voters have to do is rank the candidates in their riding in numerical order.

In a riding with three seats up for grabs, parties could each run a slate of three candidates. A party would get one, two, three (or zero) seats depending on where the voters ranked its candidates. A single, popular, independent candidate could still get a seat if over a quarter of the voters ranked her “one” (or if enough voters for dropped candidates included her in their list of choices). Nobody gets a seat without personally facing the voters. Edward Guy Kelowna