Federal electoral reform website has big problems

The Liberal “electoral reform” website has received lots of mocking on Twitter. But beneath the outrage and humour, what’s really wrong with it? Well, plenty.

It is possible to submit multiple times, so whoever has the most free time or can hire the biggest online army or has access to hackers could tilt the results as they want. With questionable data, any claim the Liberals care to make is suspect. Anyone who doesn’t like the outcome could legitimately cry foul.

Clifton van der Linden, CEO of Vox Pop Labs, the firm that developed the website, says they can detect duplicate submissions after the fact with “IP addresses and using cookies.” That’s enough to stop a naive attacker, but not enough to stop a mid-level hacker who can write a script that removes the cookies and uses many IP addresses via a botnet.

There are no questions about voter equality or proportionality of the results. This is a stunning omission in a survey that is supposed to be about electoral reform values. Voter equality and proportionality are the core values for many.

The survey is filled with questions that add a negative twist. For example, “It is better for several parties to have to govern together than for one party to make all the decisions in government, even if it takes longer for government to get things done?”

Why didn’t they ask: “It is better for one party to make all the decisions in government, even if the resulting decisions often result in worse policy?”

Both these questions ask about coalition vs. majority governments, but which version would you ask if you are hoping Canadians will support majority governments?

Mydemocracy.ca has too many ambiguous questions. For example, “Voters should be able to express multiple preferences on the ballot, even if this means that it takes longer to count the ballots and announce the election result.” How do people answer if they want multiple preferences and quick results?

Psychologists and sociologists who construct surveys all the time have strict guidelines such as, “Whenever possible, statements should be in simple sentences rather than complex or compound sentences. Avoid statements that contain ‘if’ or ‘because’ clauses.” Twelve of the first group of 20 questions break this guideline.

Several questions assume that an MP’s constituents are all the same. For example, do you prefer “members of parliament that do what their party promised, even if it means going against what their constituents want OR members of parliament that do what their constituents want, even if it means going against what their party promised?”

But this situation never occurs! There are always some constituents who want what the party promised and there are always some who do not. One of the main points of proportional representation is that a single MP cannot represent the views of all constituents. The survey could have asked, “Should people have a choice of which elected MP they approach with a specific concern?”

Finally, if one groups the first 30 questions by common theme, one finds the ‘values’ that concern the Liberal Party.

They are very concerned about coalition governments (six questions), MP loyalty to their party (four questions), diversity (four questions), online voting (four questions) and simple ballots (three questions).

These are not the ‘values’ that are of primary concern in the electoral reform debate. They could have asked about making every vote count and if the proportion of votes for a party should equal the proportion of MPs in Parliament.

They could have asked if the vast majority of voters should have an MP who represents their viewpoint and the importance of having a local MP.

But they didn’t. Instead, they asked a series of leading questions that are guaranteed to generate responses all over the map.

Then the government can claim there is no consensus and break their promise to make every vote count.

Byron Weber Becker teaches computer science at the University of Waterloo. He testified to the Special Committee on Electoral Reform and was asked to do additional work for them as a followup to his testimony.