Electoral reform fixes nothing

Dear editor: I’m sure you have all experienced being in a group of supposedly like-minded people that basically wanted a solution to a perceived problem. However, you soon found that some people took others for granted and no clear consensus existed as to what was the problem.

This didn’t deter them for there were several solutions available, and surely one of them, if adopted, would nicely fix the problem. Sound familiar? Welcome to electoral reform and the cry for proportional representation.

Proportional representation can be summed up as: if n% of the electorate support a particular party, then n% of the seats will be won by that party. All votes contribute to the result (Wikipedia).

You may wonder why no single PR solution quite fits the need for electoral reform of the first-past-the-post system. Some people advocate combining our current system with various aspects of PR systems currently in use in various countries. Without a

doubt this is one way to ensure that individual voters will have a better chance to be fairly represented politically. None of these people seem to have the true end in sight – the basic principles, if you will, that underlie representative democracy.

I reiterate two of these principles for I believe them to be sacrosanct for initiating political reform.

Do we want every vote to be treated equally or do we simply want each vote to be included in the vote count? If you want each vote to simply count, then it’s possible to recycle votes for a second, third, etc., time until it is counted. It seems to matter not, in the large scheme of things that the voter doesn’t want any of this.

If each vote is to be treated equally, then its value has to be considered within the riding and across ridings. This can be accomplished with a single candidate representing a riding. This ensures protection of another principle of authentic representative democracy – that each candidate must face the electorate in order to be awarded a legislative seat.

The fairest way to doing this is to adopt a parity electoral system.

Albert Madsen Kelowna