First Past the Post sucks. Sure, that statement may not be too eloquent, but it does sum up the current situation nicely.

In Canada, First Past the Post  refers to a system where the person with the top number of votes in a field of candidates wins a simple plurality. Simply put, in a five candidate race, if four people have 100 votes each, and the fifth has 101 votes, the candidate with 101 votes wins the election, despite statistically having no significant lead at all, and having had been outvoted 400 to 101.

It’s a bad system, we need to change it.

Now people have differing ideas as to what can be done to fix this glaring problem with our system. There is constantly floated the idea of proportional representation (PR), where the percentage of the votes given to each party help determine the make up of a legislative house. While I see the desirability of such a system, the Greens would have more than 1 MP for example, I cannot get past the fact that there would be people in that house that could never win an election on their own, but because they were on a party list somewhere. Unless carefully done, the thing opens itself up to cronyism. Since cronyism is currently part of how our senate is appointed, by the Prime Minister, maybe PR could be part of senate reform.

As for the House of Commons, which is what we are voting for tomorrow in Brandon-Souris, Provencher, Bourassa, and Toronto Centre, my feeling is that we need to go to a preferential ballot system. Basically, move the post. Nobody wins the election until someone gets 50% of the votes plus 1 more vote. My favourite is an instant-runoff voting system.

Basically an instant-runoff ballot would look the same as an existing ballot, but instead of putting an “X” by your choice, you number them in order of preference (see Wikipedia* picture to the left). Basically you get to vote your conscience, even if your preferred candidate has no chance of actually winning, yet you also get a strategic vote, because your second, and third (4th, 5th, etc) are also recorded.

So, let’s look at how this affects the real world. Here in Brandon-Souris we have a five person race happening; Larry Maguire for the Conservatives, Rolf Dinsdale for the Liberals, Frank Godon for Libertarian, Cory Szczepanski for the NDP, and David Neufeld for the Green Party.

Now, as of today it looks like Dinsdale has 50% of the vote. If that is true and he was the first choice of 50% + 1 voters, then he would be the winner, election over. But let’s say for a moment that the race is 46% Maguire, 44% for Dinsdale, 7% Szczepanski , 2% Neufeld, and 1% Godon. In our current system, Maguire wins. Hey, 46% is a good number and we routinely elect entire governments on less than 40% of the vote and then comically call it a landslide victory. Now, for ease of numbers, lets say that all of Godon’s voters pick Maguire as their second choice. Another round is counted, and now we have 47% for Maguire, with the other three staying the same.

Third round. Neufelds voters all picked Szczepanski as their second choice. Now we have Maguire 47%, Dinsdale 44%, Szczepanski 9%. Maguire still has not broken the barrier of 50% +1. Fourth round. Again, for easy numbers, all of Neufeld’s voters picked Dinsdale as their third choice, and all of Szczepanski’s voters picked Dinsdale as their second choice. In this final round the results become Dinsdale 53%, Maguire 47%.

Dinsdale wins.

Now, some will argue that it is unfair to Maguire because he originally had more votes than Dinsdale. Yes, that is a valid point. But it is also a valid point that with the choice of only Maguire and Dinsdale, more people prefer Dinsdale. What it in essence does is it forces candidates to appeal to more than their base to win an election. Sure, your base can get you a good part of the way their, but you need to broaden your appeal to actually get elected.

The other advantage of this system is that I think it is the easiest to implement. It requires the least change to our electoral system, and it has the least probability of needing a constitutional amendment to enact it.

This present system has produced huge “landslides” for the (Progressive) Conservatives and the Liberals while actually getting less than half of the population actually voting for them. It needs to end.

*graphic from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Preferential_ballot.svg