Electoral systems are worth understanding

If anything of educational value emerges from the 2016 U.S. election, it would be the opportunity to ensure Grade 11 and 12 students have a proper understanding of how governments are formed through the bewildering variety of complicated electoral systems used in those countries where people are actually allowed to vote, countries that describe themselves as democracies.

Such a course might also prepare students for the serious responsibilities soon to be assumed in the Canadian version of a democratic system and why they should participate.

It would be worth taking some class time to examine the U.S. electoral system and how a candidate for president, with about two million more popular votes than her competitor, and the general concept of democracy, were both defeated by a combination of the electoral college system and voter apathy.

Early statistical analysis of the U.S. results reveal that only 25.5 per cent of voters voted for Trump while 25.6 per cent appear to have voted for Clinton, with an astounding 46.9 per cent of eligible voters declining to vote at all. That requires some explanation beyond what kids hear.

The U.S. electoral college is a state-by-state, population-based, mostly “winner take all” system, so no matter how the national popular vote was distributed, 290 electoral votes went to Trump and 228 to Clinton. Game over — almost.

To complicate matters further, the U.S. constitution requires that electors of the electoral college are the only real people who will vote for president, when they meet on Dec. 19 in their respective state capitals.

That result then needs to be confirmed in early January when Congress counts the electoral votes in a seemingly never-ending process.

All kind of mind-boggling but worth understanding.

U.S. history informs us that this is the sixth time the winner of the popular vote has not become president. viewed by many as evidence of the failure of the U.S. system in which, this time, nearly half the eligible population did not vote.

In contrast, and this is even more important to explain to Grade 11 and 12s, voter turnout in Canadian federal elections has only been somewhat better than in the U.S. election.

Even so, voter turnout fell dramatically between 1962 (79 per cent) and 2011 (61.4 per cent), the third lowest in Canadian history.

While voter turnout in the Canadian 2015 federal election rose to 65.8 per cent of eligible voters (the highest turnout since 1993), that still leaves a third of voters ignoring the opportunity to influence the future of their nation. That’s a considerably lower turnout than many comparable countries — Australia, New Zealand, Belgium, Germany, Ireland and the Scandinavian countries, as examples.

As it was, a Canadian government was elected in 2015 with the support of only 39.5 per cent of those who voted.

There is an important lesson here for Canadian kids, who should be learning why each vote counts because of Canada’s “first past the post” electoral system.

Here in Canada, the candidate with the most votes in a riding wins a seat in the House of Commons and represents that riding as its member of Parliament. So far, so good.

The governor general then asks the MPs to form a government, which is normally the party whose candidates won the most seats. That party’s leader generally becomes prime minister. Simple. Easy to understand. No complicated U.S. electoral-college system, no two- or three-stage system of confirmation of results.

Also important to understand is that there is a long list of Canadian federal and provincial ridings over the years that have been decided by between zero votes’ difference between candidates (the returning officer in some cases was called upon to cast a deciding vote) and fewer than 30 votes.

While party politics should not be brought into the classroom, students would benefit from a greater understanding of the bizarre intricacies of the U.S. election, the contrast with our own electoral system, the role played by social media and the inevitable controversy about other media coverage. They should understand how elections affect their future and why the right to vote will be one of their most important rights.