ELECTORAL REFORM EVEN FOGGIER AFTER THE VOTE

Details to be decided by MLAs are — there’s that word again — complicated

When Attorney General David Eby crafted his recommendations for the fall referendum on electoral reform, he deliberately excluded the voters from having a say on key aspects of the proposed systems of proportional representation.

Between four and a dozen issues would be decided after the referendum is over, depending on which — if any — of the three versions of PR chosen by Eby were to emerge victorious in the fall ballot-by-mail.

Many of those matters would have “a significant effect on how a voting system works in practice,” as Eby himself acknowledges in the report that went out over his signature this week.

Most matters to be decided after the fact would be delegated to an all-party committee of the legislature, on which the New Democrats and their Green partners in power-sharing would command a majority of the seats.

Fully a dozen key considerations would be postponed until after the voting is done for the mixed-member proportional system, an option favoured in the past by the New Democrats and the Greens and rejected by B.C.’s citizens’ assembly on electoral reform.

The “mixed” aspect of the system arises because some members would be elected to the legislature on the current first-past-the-post system, and others chosen (on the basis of the popular vote) from party lists. In the version proposed by Eby, local constituencies would be combined to reduce the tally of first-past-the-post seats by between 30 and 35. The house would then be topped up by 35 to 38 seats to be chosen from party lists.

But Eby would leave it to the committee of MLAs to decide whether political parties would determine the order of the names on their list (meaning the selections could be shaped by party insiders) or whether the electorate could also vote on who got elected from the lists.

Other matters excluded from the ballot-by-mail and left to the committee include the breakdown between first-past-the-post and list seats and whether the voters will be able to exercise a double franchise, casting one ballot for their local candidate and a second for their party preference.

Those issues were also left undermined by Eby for another of his options, the proposed rural-urban proportional voting system (RUP).

But where MMP is in place in a number of jurisdictions, RUP is an unknown, one of two options on Eby’s list that is ( by his own admission) not used anywhere today.

It is also the most complicated of the alternatives, combining as it does MMP (itself an amalgam of two electoral systems) plus the single transferable vote system that was turned down the last time British Columbians voted on electoral reform.

Having struggled to explain the intricacies of STV during the 2005 and 2009 referendums, I was transported back to those days by several details from Eby’s proposed RUR model: “Droop formula used to determine electoral quota. Weighted inclusive Gregory method for distributing surplus votes. All surplus votes transferred at a fraction.” Brought tears to my eyes.

In addition to what Eby would leave to a legislature committee, he’d also ask an electoral boundary commission to sort out some important matters.

With the rural-urban option, the commission would decide “the number and configuration of MMP and STV regions, the number and configuration of FPTP districts in each MMP region, the number of list PR seats in each MMP region, and the number and configuration of STV districts.”

Got that? Still some New Democrats insist the Eby proposals are simplicity itself.

The third option on the list is a dual member proportional system, as unproven as the rural-urban option but not as complicated.

DMP calls for most of the province’s existing 87 legislature seats to be merged to create two-member districts. The first seat would be filled by the candidate who got the most votes in the district, the second outcome determined by the popular vote.

The basic idea is that the second seats would be filled to top up representation in the legislature for parties that did better in the popular vote than in the count of first seats.

But as the report also notes, “the process for allocating the second seat in each district is fairly complicated.” There’s that word again — complicated.

Left to the legislature committee under DMP would be a judgment call on the total number of seats (up to 95) in an expanded legislature and whether to establish a factor, known as a reserve, to ensure that the second seats go to a party’s most popular candidates.

In defence of sending so many matters to the legislature committee, the Eby report maintains that because no party holds a majority of seats in the house, “therefore the committee’s recommendations would require thoughtful compromise among all parties.”

But the New Democrats and the Greens would have the majority of seats and on the drive to bring about proportional representation they march in lockstep. They would probably decide all those undecided matters in favour of their political interest as well.

“Past referenda have demonstrated the challenges involved in informing and educating the general public about the choices before them,” Eby’s report acknowledges. “For this referendum, that challenge is arguably greater, given the degree of choice being offered to the voters.”

To which Eby has now added the challenge of informing the public about choices that will be made after the fact by the partners who launched this deck-stacking exercise in the first place.

Fully a dozen key considerations would be postponed until after the voting is done for the mixedmember proportional system.