Voting questions that make sense
After the backlash, inevitably, comes the backlash against the backlash.
The storm of criticism that greeted the Liberals’ latest pass at public consultation on electoral reform, the now notorious mydemocracy. ca, has since been answered by a raft of sympathetic interviews with its creators, supportive political scientists and Liberal MPs.
The theme: people just didn’t understand what the survey was trying to do. Far from the dippy pop quiz or botched push- poll it might appear, it was in fact a laudable effort to delve into voters’ underlying values: a complex matrix of orthogonal preferences that cannot be understood without reference to the inevitable tradeoffs, etc., etc., etc.
And if that were in fact what the fuss was about, that might be a solid defence. The problem with the survey is not that it sought to understand people’s values, or to present them with trade-offs. Or at least, there would be no objection to such a survey had it been conducted, say, a year ago, in advance of the various other public consultation exercises that have since been conducted, notably by the special parliamentary committee on electoral reform.
But if there is to be yet another public consultation, it should at least be a) scientific, and b) fair. I’ ll leave to others the broader methodological problems with the survey : that participation is voluntary and self- selected, inevitably skewing the population sample; that it is possible to enter as many times as you like; that there is no certainty that participants are adults, citizens or even resident in Canada; and so on.
It’s the questions, rather, that truly discredit i t. A good many — two- thirds of the “values” questions, and over half of those probing respondents’ “preferences” — have nothing to do with electoral reform as such, but rather appear to be drawn from a shopping list of items the government might pass off as “reform,” from online voting to making election day a statutory holiday to “special measures” to increase representation of Liberal target demographics.
As for the questions that actually did touch on electoral reform, however tangentially: The issue, again, isn’t that it asked people to think about trade- offs. No one is pretending reform would be without drawbacks, or that it does not involve some prioritization of values. It’s that the trade-offs it presents are so selective, arbitrary and one-sided.
In some cases they involve flagrant false oppositions, stark choices that are not so stark as all that, or even choices. For example: “Ballots should be as simple as possible so that everybody understands how to vote OR ballots should allow everybody to express their preferences in detail?” It’s not even clear what this means. No electoral system that I am aware of allows “everybody to express their preferences in detail.” If the issue is that there might be more choices on the ballot under proportional representation than at present, it is not self- evident this must be at the expense of people understanding how to vote. It is perfectly possible to imagine ballots that were both simple and less restrictive.
In other cases, the alleged consequences of a given choice assume worst- case scenarios, to the point of caricature. Thus: “Having many small parties in Parliament representing many different views OR having a few big parties that try to appeal to a broad range of people?” Or: “There should be parties in Parliament that represent the views of all Canadians, even if some are radical or extreme.”
The assumption that PR means “many small parties,” or that these would necessarily be “radical or extreme,” is just one possibility among others; it depends, in part, on how it is designed. To imply that it is even likely is contradicted by a substantial body of evidence. Most of the countries in Europe that use it, at least in any form likely to be proposed for Canada, have about six to eight parties in their legislature. We have five. Yet the survey fixates on this scare story.
And in almost every case the choice upon which such doubt is cast is the reform option, against which the status quo is presented as i mplicitly problem- f ree. Along with the hard- tounderstand ballots and “many small parties,” respondents are menaced with a world in which it “takes longer for government to get things done,” is “less clear who is accountable,” and “takes longer to count the ballots,” among other perils.
It isn’t that these are necessarily invalid concerns. It’s just a very incomplete depiction of the actual range of trade-offs involved. A survey that was designed to be fair might have paid more attention to the trade- offs associated with the present system, which are not a matter of conjecture but observation.
Thus: “MPs should be elected by a plurality vote in single-member ridings, even if this means they only represent the views of a minority of a riding’s voters.” Or: “A party with a minority of the vote should be entitled to rule as if it had a majority, even if it this leads to wild swings in policy from one election to the next.” Or: “Parties that can bunch their vote geographically should be advantaged over parties that have broad appeal, even if this results in a separatist party becoming the Official Opposition.”
Or how about: “Voters should have to vote for just one party, even if this means they cannot vote for the party they prefer, but must vote for a party they dislike to prevent a party they detest from getting in.” I suspect the results might be a little different in that case, and lot more useful.
A FAIR SURVEY MIGHT HAVE DEALT WITH CURRENT TRADE-OFFS.