Here’s why we need electoral reform
“What is the problem electoral reform is supposed to solve” is the question of the hour. In my last column I suggested a few. The present system allows the minority to rule over the majority. It gives to some voters many times the voting power of others, while giving many others none at all. It ghettoizes representation on regional lines, exaggerating, and exacerbating, national divisions. Sometimes it even results in all of the seats in a region, or all of the seats in a provincial legislature, going to a single party.
Any one of these, you would t hink, should be enough to condemn it. The principles of majority rule or the equality of every voter are hardly trivial matters, after all. Were a government to try to pass legislation through Parliament with the votes of fewer than 40 per cent of its members, or if ballots were issued to some voters but not to others, there would presumably be riots in the streets. Yet a system that, election after election, achieves much the same effect raises barely a shrug — certainly whenever it is proposed to do something about it.
All right. Let’s delve a little further, then. For the effects of first past the post, as the present system is often called, are not limited to how the votes are counted on election night, but make themselves felt every day in between: in how the parties campaign, in how the voters respond, and so forth.
The fundamental characteristic of first past the post is that it is a “winnertake- all” system: The candidate with the most votes in a riding, however small a proportion of the total this may be, wins the sole right to represent it. We think of this as the natural and normal system because it is the only one most of us have ever known. But in fact it is highly anomalous: three- quarters of the world’s democracies, and 91 per cent of OECD countries, have adopted a different system. Possibly they had good reason.
One consequence of plurality voting is to produce a lot of what we blandly refer to as “safe seats,” ridings or indeed regions where one party so habitually comes out ahead that the others might as well not bother campaigning. By contrast, the bulk of the parties’ energies and the media’s coverage are typically focused on a handful of “battleground” ridings where the outcome is in some doubt. The notion that every riding ought to be a battleground, with parties competing hard for every vote, does not seem to occur to us.
But of course what distinguishes the one from the other usually has less to do with how the winning party performs ( one in five ridings in the past election were won with less than 40 per cent of the vote) than with how the votes of the other 60 or 70 per cent are distributed — that is, whether they are “split” evenly among the other parties or whether one party wins the lion’s share. Hence in every election voters are enjoined in the most strident terms not to “waste” their vote on a party that cannot win — that is, on the party they actually prefer — but are instead told to vote for another party they might dislike, in order to prevent a party they detest from sneaking in.
Declining voter turnout has many causes, but a system in which the results over much of the country are a foregone conclusion, or in which the votes for any but the winning candidate are considered “wasted,” in the sense that they do not contribute to electing anyone — in a typical election, that would apply to more than half of all votes cast — is hardly likely to have people rushing to the polls.
Neither is a system with such built- in incentives for poor political behaviour. Where a party must put together a popular majority to govern, alone or in concert with other parties, its incentives are to reach out beyond its core voters. But where the plurality rules, particularly where, as in this country, turnout is such an important variable, then the game becomes less about broadening the base than firing it up, mostly by instilling fear and loathing of the other parties.
The nature of winner-take-all systems, moreover, is that they are highly leveraged: A comparatively small shift in the popular vote often results in hugely disproportionate swings in the number of seats a party wins. Politicians are by nature risk averse. Consequently there is little incentive for parties to take chances aimed at expanding their support, for example by staking out new or distinctive policy positions — for they might just as well see it shrink. Instead they tend to hug the middle for long stretches, save for a few wedge issues aimed at a relatively small number of “swing” voters, which they trot out at election time.
In sum, the present system gives rise to false and exaggerated majorities, discriminates among voters, rewards regionally divisive parties and polarizing political strategies, strands many voters in “safe” ridings and wastes the votes of many others. I’ ll grant that some of these effects were less pronounced in the most recent election. But one election does not make a trend.
Very well, you may be saying: the system we have is deeply flawed. But aren’t the other systems worse? I’ ll turn to that question in another column.