The Alberta election and Single Transferable Vote

When I was a first-year undergraduate, one of my friends, also a first-year who had Ideas And Opinions, tried to reform the student body elections system to conduct the voting according to the Single Transferable Vote system. I believe it succeeded, and it was still being used at the institution in question, largely because inertia is such a powerful force and nobody really wanted to deal with this guy on a personal level. There are two major problems with STV: one, it’s horribly complicated, compared with your standard first-past-the-post system, and two, it’s sort of hard to tell what happens to your vote without intimidating mathematics and figures. This is largely why the BC-STV system, proposed by the B.C. Citizens’ Assembly on Electoral Reform, failed when put up to a referendum in 2005. This editorial in today’s Vancouver Sun advocates for the adoption of the BC-STV system, as well as support for funding an educational campaign to counter the general ignorance that alternative systems of voting even exist in the first place.

So anyway, on Monday, there was an election in Alberta, and nobody noticed. The Conservative Party won their eleventh straight majority, picking up 73 of 83 seats in the provincial legislature. However, there was only a 43% turnout of registered voters, and of those votes only 52% went to the Tories. However, because of the way the votes were distributed and because of the low turnout, this translated into an 88% yield on seats. This was made possible because of the first-past-the-post electoral system, in which whichever candidate gets a plurality of all votes cast wins the election. The Sun editorial theorizes that had an STV system been in place instead, the results would have been something like 44 Conservatives, 22 Liberals, 7 from the NDP, 6 from the right-wing Wildrose Alliance Party, and 4 Greens. A far cry from 73 out of 83 seats going to the Tories, as it has been for the last several decades. Sure, they would have still had a majority, but it would not have been of the unreasonable 88% completely dominant majority type that we’re going to see again in Alberta.

When you have multiple significant parties several of which share similar platforms, such as, say, the Liberals and the NDP, or the Conservatives and the Wildrose Alliance, or (in the States) the Democrats and the Greens, you might want a way to be able to vote your conscience as well as vote pragmatically. STV allows you to do that by letting you vote your number-one preference for, say, the NDP, and your number-two preference for the Liberals. Or in whatever order you prefer. The standard first-past-the-post system pigeonholes you into exactly one of a few categories of opinion, and in doing so, penalizes small parties or small candidates. The effects of this can be far-reaching: for example, if you don’t have any safe way to vote for Ralph Nader, your vote for him is an unsafe one, because it might have gone to your second-choice candidate Al Gore, but without that vote to count towards his total, George Bush will win your state’s votes in the Electoral College. With STV, this scenario can be avoided because if you marked Ralph Nader as your first choice but Ralph Nader did not accumulate the necessary number of votes to pass a round of electoral counting, your second choice vote will go to Al Gore and tally up in his column.

At any rate, B.C. should adopt the BC-STV system in 2009 when it comes up for another vote, and this sort of lopsided elections mathematics can be avoided. All it takes is a little effort to understand, and a willingness to commit to the rights of all people to choose the parties and the people that will represent them.