C8

Julie Michaud

Stumble Upon

del.icio.us

Digg

Facebook

Print

Email

3 Comment(s)

Please sir"¦ I want some democracy," begs a dirt-smudged street urchin on www.orphanvoters.ca.

Enlarge Photo

The Canadian Press

Green thumbs: Conservative Leader Stephen Harper, left, looks at Green Party Leader Elizabeth May as she gives a thumbs up prior to the start of the English language federal election debate Oct. 2. In the 2006 election, more than 650,000 Canadians voted for the Green party without electing a single MP. By comparison, less than a half-million Liberal voters in Atlantic Canada elected 20 MPs, which Julie Michaud sees as an example of an unfair system.

The website is sponsored by Fair Vote Canada and provides an introduction to electoral reform, fact sheets, and even an orphan voter calculator.

"Orphan" or wasted votes are defined as votes that do not result in representation for voters. Though we might tell ourselves that each person gets a vote, our 12th century First Past the Post (FPTP) voting system means any vote not cast for the winning candidate in a given riding is essentially discarded.

Fair Vote Canada points out that "in the 2006 federal election, more than 650,000 Green Party voters across the country elected no one. Meanwhile, fewer than a half-million Liberal voters in Atlantic Canada alone elected 20 MPs.

In the prairie provinces, Conservatives won three times as many votes as the Liberals, but were given nearly 10 times as many seats. But more than 400,000 Conservative voters in Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver couldn't elect a single MP. The NDP attracted a million more votes than the Bloc, but the voting system gave the Bloc 51 seats and the NDP 29."

Nationally a total of 7,584,409 voters (51.2 per cent) wasted their votes in the last federal election. In Fredericton the figure was 27,362 voters (58.2 per cent).

With so many votes lost to our antiquated FPTP voting system, is it any wonder that in the last federal election, voter turnout was an underwhelming 64.7 per cent?

To add insult to injury, FPTP means that it's often more beneficial for a party to establish policies good for particular regions where support is already high, while ignoring regions that traditionally vote for any of the opposing parties.

Most industrial democracies got rid of this winner-take-all style of voting 50-100 years ago.

In fact, the only ones still using this system are Canada, the US and the UK (though a form of proportional representation known as the mixed member system is now being used to elect the members of the Scottish Parliament and the Welsh National Assembly).

FPTP's natural tendency to misrepresent true voter intent often results in false majorities. In Canada's 15 majority governments since the First World War, only four won the majority of popular votes.

Even in the case of true majorities, our current winner-take-all system causes problems. In 1987 Frank McKenna's Liberals managed to secure 100 per cent of the seats, despite the fact that 40 per cent of voters voted for other parties.

It's interesting to note that during his term as premier, Bernard Lord proposed to hold a referendum on proportional representation before the 2006 election, but never got around to it.

Ironically, his party won the popular vote in the last election by a slim margin.

Perennial frustration with our inadequate voting system has resulted in the curious phenomenon of strategic voting - voting for the lesser of two evils rather than the desired candidate - and its close and technologically savvier cousin, Internet vote swapping.

That so many of us feel compelled to vote strategically should highlight the gross ineptitude of our current system. It should compel us to look to the source of this peculiar behaviour and demand electoral reform from all elected representatives.

It's telling that 75 other democracies have chosen some form of proportional representation system, including most European countries and most major nations of the Americas. In proportional representation systems, each vote counts. A party will receive a number of seats closely correlating with the popular vote. In other words, the parties' representation reflects the way people voted.

Countries that have proportional representation see far fewer wasted votes and clearer election results; higher voter turnout; parliaments that are representative of political views and electorate composition (gender, ethnicity, and regions); legislation that is in line with the views of the majority of the public; and citizens who feel they are adequately represented.

I suspect that unfair voting systems do more than just discourage voter turnout. Since voting is a central building block of democracy, the sight of Canada's crumbling foundations does little to encourage democratic citizen engagement during the intervening years between visits to the polling station.

Julie Michaud is the Climate Action Coordinator with the Conservation Council of New Brunswick. Her column appears every fourth week.