PR for British Columbia

[Clay Shentrup]

http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/pr-electoral-reform-questions-1.4688604

Anyone have an opinion on the three PR options?

[Brian Olson]

1. Party list proportional; bleh, I dislike giving parties that much power.

2. District reps with some sort of extra at-large reps based on province-wide votes for a party. I still dislike giving parties power that way.

3. System 2 for "rural" districts, STV for urban areas. Wat? Why the bizarre rural/urban split? Okay, I can guess why, it's a standard fear of STV that rural areas will lose all representation and all the people will be elected from urban areas. But it's proportional, are there people out there in the rural lands? A system that represents people will represent them wherever they are (as long as they show up and vote).

In My Fabulous Opinion, 3 is kinda okay, 1 and 2 are undesirable for entrenching the power of political parties.

On Tue, Jun 5, 2018 at 3:31 AM, Clay Shentrup <cshe...@gmail.com> wrote:

http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/pr-electoral-reform-questions-1.4688604

Anyone have an opinion on the three PR options?

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[Ciaran Dougherty]

Why do you suppose they're doing things differently with respect to rural constituencies?

In both Option 1 (Dual Member) and Option 3 (STV/Dual Member), they treat Rural districts differently from Urban ones.

As to Option 1 (Dual Member), I think my biggest problem with the idea is that the party list can't be rearranged by the voter.  If you're going to allow the Party to decide on a List, the voters should be able to reorder the list.  For example, Disney put forth Donald Duck and Mickey Mouse, and Disney won that constituency, DMP as written would seat Donald, even if most voters would have preferred Mickey.

I think that if I were to tweak the procedure, I would tweak it to have two possible marks, one next to Donald, one next to Mickey.  The party with the most votes between the candidates would still win the seat (to solve the Vote Splitting issue), but would seat the candidate with more votes.

[Markus Schulze]

Hallo,

I would vote for DMP.

In my opinion, MMP gives too much power to the parties.

My problem with Rural-Urban is that it contains too many
parameters. I don't know what I would actually get when
Rural-Urban was adopted.

None of the three PR proposals addresses sufficiently the
problem that a party might already win more district seats
than it deserves in total according to its proportional
share of party votes.

I predict that MMP will win the referendum, simply because
MMP is more well-known than DMP or Rural-Urban. I believe
that DMP will come a close second.

Markus Schulze

[Sara Wolf]

I would vote MMP/STV? Maybe.

Option 1- Dual Member: Two seats is not enough to be PR in a provence where many ridings have a strong showing of Liberals, NDP, Greens and Conservatives. 
Option 2- MMP: I like that "there would be a combination of regular ridings and extra PR MLAs" but a party based system in a province with 3 parties with huge overlap in terms of views and platform makes no sense. What matters in those cases is the candidate, not the platform. Just because I love my local NDP doesn't mean I love them all. 
Option 3- Rural Urban aka MMP/STV: STV has good results, right? Similar to RRV? My main concern is that this would be used internationally to promote and use IRV, which is not good with multiple viable candidates. 

@Jameson Quinn: The big question. How does this effect the elections for Prime Minister? Strategic voting by riding was a HUGE thing and probably the main reason Trudeau was elected finally after a decade of Harper. (The NDP and Liberals split the vote and elected a hated conservative for a full decade.) Changing BC ridings will have a big impact on that and BC is pissed at the liberals right now. Will this result in a return to the spoiler effect picking the prime minister? 

[Ciaran Dougherty]

Are you familiar with DMP? It's a variant on MMP, where the party list is defined by the highest scoring candidate not already elected.

The only thing keeping it from being as proportional as MMP is the arbitrary threshold for whether a given candidate is eligible to be seated; if a party wins more than 2.8% of the vote, they are theoretically entitled to a seat, but if no candidates make a 5% cutoff, there would be no one eligible to take that seat.

I mean, it still gives power to parties, rather than voters (which could be mitigated by allowing the voters to mark A1 or A2, rather than just A), but it's not as flawed as it looks at first glance.

Further, the fact that they aren't proposing that rural constituencies put forth two candidates isn't as bad as it first seems, because their votes would still be counted for the proportional set, and their unseated candidates would still be eligible for seating in that round.

[parker friedland]

Well, it looks like all of the options incorporate a version of MMP by compensating parties that win less constituency seats with more 'balancing' seats that balance the proportionality.

> Two seats is not enough to be PR in a Provence where many constituencies have a strong showing of Liberals, NDP, Greens and Conservatives.

Duel member rep also uses these extra balancing seats just like MMP however it makes sure that the extra balancing seats are elected from constituencies that closely match those original districts. For example, if you need to elect 10 extra NDP seats, 20 extra LIB seats and 30 extra Green seats, MMP would just elect those extra 'balancing' seats by looking at each of those party's lists and electing the first 10 NDP candidates on the NDP list, the first 20 LIB candidates on the LIB seat, and the first 30 Green candidates on the Green list. DMP on the other hand picks 10 NDPs from constituencies where the NDP lost but still got a lot of votes (or did so well that that constituency deserves to be represented by 2 NDPs), and the same with the other parties. What DMP tries to do is make it so each constituency's second winners matches how those constituancies voted as closely as possible while still maintaining proportionality such that each party still gets a number of seats proportional to the number of voters that voted for them. I'm not a huge fan of party list voting so I think that this is definitely an improvement over normal MMP. The problem with DMP is it's added complexity in comparison to MMP so while I prefer DMP, it is probably going to be the underdog in this referendum.

The the main problem with all of these options is that they are all based off of MMP, which I'm not a fan of. I'm not a fan of MMP for two main reasons: 2 party domination and potential for strategic voting.

To address my first problem with MMP: because a large portion of the seats are still elected with FPTP, most of the parliament will still be controlled by 2 dominant political parties. (ex: New Zealand: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Zealand_Parliament#/media/File%3ANew_Zealand_House_of_Representatives_-_Layout_Chart.svg) and the more seats there are that are elected by FPTP in proportion to the number of 'balancing' seats, the worse this domination becomes. This problem with MMP can be fixed by switching to a better voting method such as approval, score, STAR, or at the very least IRV for the constituency seats, but with the exception of BC's rural/urban proposal, BC seems set on having MMP with all FPTP constituency seats. I'm guessing that under MMP, this ratio will unfortunately likely be 2 FPTP seats to 1 balancing seat in BC because BC's PR report recommended that at least 60% of the seats should be elected under FPTP and in the Prince Edward Islanders's non-binding PR referendum, the MMP proposal had a ratio was 2 to 1. In DMP however, the ratio is forced to be 1 to 1, which is just another reason I have for wanting DMP to win instead of MMP.

The second problem I have with MMP is it's maintainability to strategic voting. I've explained this point in Sightline's comment section on this article: http://www.sightline.org/2017/06/19/this-is-how-new-zealand-fixed-its-voting-system/ but to summarize, voters can game by voting for dominant parties like they would under FPTP for the constituency seats and voting for a different party for the balancing seats so the party they vote for for the balancing seats is not penalized for the number of seats the dominant party ideologically similar to them won in the FPTP constituencies. When all voters do this, the election devolves into a FPTP PR hybrid where x% of the seats are elected by FPTP and y% are elected by PR. To prevent this from happening, countries that use MMP have extremely high bars 3rd parties need to pass in order to win balancing seats, such as requiring that the party gets at least 5% of the balancing seat vote and win at least one constituency seat so they can't just run candidates for 1 part of the election without also running candidates in the other part. However these fixes further promote 2 party domination which is my first problem with MMP. In the comments section of the sight line article, I also offered a possible solution which is to bind voter's constituency votes to their 'balance' votes, and DMP does this, which is yet another reason why I prefer DMP to MMP, however binding these votes together has the potential to encourage voters who were going to strategically vote for a dominate party in their own constituency to also vote for their party for the balancing seats. But as long as there are enough balancing seats to ensure proportionality, voters shouldn't have to think about voting strategically for their constituancy seat in the first place.

My biggest concern with the rual urban proposal is MMP problem #2. We can all agree that it would be really unfair to just elect urban progressive constituency seats proportionality while electing rural conservative seats majoritarianly because that would mean that conservatives are complicated for under preforming in urban BC but progressives are not also concatenated for under preforming in rural BC. The logic behind the rural/urban proposal is that that wont be an issue if you just add some balancing seats. However, if the liberals encourage the conservatives to vote for a different conservative party for the balancing seats, then so much for MMP complicating for the unfair advantage the urban/rural PR/FPTP combination sets up.

So if I lived in BC and was going to vote honestly, my vote would be:
1. DMP
2. MMP
3. Rural Urban

However, strategically, DMP is probably the underdog. Because MMP has a better chance at beating Rural Urban in a head to head match then DMP does because of it's simplicity, if I lived in BC, I might also consider voting:
1. MMP
2. DMP
3. Rural Urban

[parker friedland]

> I predict that MMP will win the referendum, simply because
> MMP is more well-known than DMP or Rural-Urban. I believe
> that DMP will come a close second.

Well according to this non-scientific twitter poll, it's going to be an MMP blowout:

https://twitter.com/cbcnewsbc/status/1001903568117379074?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw&ref_url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.cbc.ca%2Fnews%2Fcanada%2Fbritish-columbia%2Fanalysis-eby-pr-reform-may-30-1.4684681

[Sara Wolf]

Two party dominated BC would likely be an NDP and Liberal split. 

Party lists suck and am I right that in DM and MMP a green voter on Vancouver island would be better off voting NDP so they are better represented province wide? Greens won a few island ridings but are a slim minority most places. An anti-pipeline vote is a green vote. A liberal vote is not an anti-pipeline or indigenous friendly vote these days.  

​

[parker friedland]

> Two party dominated BC would likely be an NDP and Liberal split.

What I mean is under MMP, all the 3rd parties combined will probably control an average of just a third of the parliament at most.

[Jameson Quinn]

I was one of the main organizers of the bcprsymposium.ca. This was cited 4 times by attorney general Dave Eby in his plan for the referendum and clearly had an impact. Of our 12 recommendations, 6 of them were followed essentially completely, 3 partially, and 3 not. So I know something about what's going on in BC.

2018-06-10 1:42 GMT-04:00 Sara Wolf <sa...@equal.vote>:

I would vote MMP/STV? Maybe.

Option 1- Dual Member: Two seats is not enough to be PR in a provence where many ridings have a strong showing of Liberals, NDP, Greens and Conservatives. 

DMP is not "a bunch of 2-seat districts". It's more like "MMP, with 50/50 district/proportional seats, except to decide who gets each proportional seat you look at the district results and make sure there's one proportional seat per district". In other words, it's plenty proportional for parties like BC Greens or (hypothetical) BC Conservatives. 

My biggest problem with DMP is that, while it's not as unaccountable as closed list, it doesn't give any intra-party options to voters. If I like party A but not my local party A option, I'm out of luck. Letting me vote for A1 or A2 would be a bit better, but still not a lot of choice in that sense; and it would lead to the possibility where (A1+A2)>B1>A1>A2 and then you could argue that A1 or B1 should get the seat. Obviously there would be a rule for that but some people would think it was wrong.

Option 2- MMP: I like that "there would be a combination of regular ridings and extra PR MLAs" but a party based system in a province with 3 parties with huge overlap in terms of views and platform makes no sense. What matters in those cases is the candidate, not the platform. Just because I love my local NDP doesn't mean I love them all. 

Option 2 is the most up-in-the-air. In our recommendations, said clearly and repeatedly that for MMP the devil is in the details. Welsh-style MMP (closed list, two votes, only second vote counts for party proportions) is pretty bad; it strongly rewards strategic vote-splitting and gives very little individual accountability. Bavarian-style MMP, with pseudo-transfers for sub-threshold votes, (open list, two votes, both count equally for party proportions, except that if one is for a party with 0 seats then the other one counts 100% for party proportions) is pretty good; it has good accountability and intra-party voter choice.

I would say that, given how much our expert voice was respected in the first stage, the chances that they'd listen to us in the post-referendum setting of details is not bad. Of course, at that point things are in the hands of an "all-party commission" of politicians, so there is an a priori bias towards closed list. Still, I'd guess that the chances of a Bavarian-style system would be over 50%, given the pressure from outside and the clear message from the consultation process that voters do not want closed lists.

 

Option 3- Rural Urban aka MMP/STV: STV has good results, right? Similar to RRV? My main concern is that this would be used internationally to promote and use IRV, which is not good with multiple viable candidates.  

Yes, this is... pretty good, but in terms of its impact on the larger global dialogue on prop-rep methods, mainly bad. It would basically be seen as "a quaint local version of STV" and used to advance STV internationally. But honestly I don't see this being chosen; I think it will come in last. I expect MMP to win.

 

@Jameson Quinn: The big question. How does this effect the elections for Prime Minister?

You mean, Premier. This is only for provincial elections.

 

Strategic voting by riding was a HUGE thing and probably the main reason Trudeau was elected finally after a decade of Harper. (The NDP and Liberals split the vote and elected a hated conservative for a full decade.) Changing BC ridings will have a big impact on that and BC is pissed at the liberals right now. Will this result in a return to the spoiler effect picking the prime minister? 

It will mean that coalition governments, where no one party has a majority of seats, become more common. (Some people call these "minority governments" but I think "40% of the voters and 60% of the seats" is more of a "minority government" than "my party by itself got a minority but I have support from representatives of a majority of voters" is.) This means a slight increase in the number of governments that don't last a full term because the coalition falls apart.

[Sara Wolf]

@Jameson Quinn: The big question. How does this effect the elections for Prime Minister?

Re "You mean, Premier. This is only for provincial elections."

 

No, I mean Prime Minister. I was in BC for the last Prime Minster election and all anyone was talking about was strategically electing the MP to your riding that added up to the best chance for beating Harper nationally. This is how Harper was defeated, finally! In each riding voters voted not for their favorite, but for the party that had the best chance of beating the Conservative. This led to WAY less conservatives getting elected in BC, which in turn led to less votes for Harper. A person becomes prime minister by being leader of the political party that wins the most seats in the House of Commons in a Canadian federal election. It was a coordinated shut out. 

Redistricting BC and giving the conservatives their fair share of seats (MPs) in the House of Commons in BC will help Conservatives in the next Prime Minister election. Unless I'm missing something. Would this new system not be used for MPs and just be for provincial elections? If so how would the redistricting itself effect things? Now after the last election with the big conservative win in Ontario last week this should be an even bigger concern. 

After the strategic election in 2015, BC ridings elected their MPs like so: Liberal: 18, Conservative: 9, NDP: 14, Green: 1. 
The chart I posted above was about MLAs with many less conservatives represented. 
(Your MLA (Member of the Legislative Assembly) is your local representative in the provincial legislative assembly. Your MP (Member of Parliament) is your local representative in the federal Parliament.)

How was it before 2015? I'm having a hard time finding the data. How would it be after each new system? That's the question. I'm not super clear on if this would be used to elect 

http://www.thecanadaguide.com/government/house-of-commons/
https://www.huffingtonpost.ca/ali-kashani/strategic-voting-justin-trudeau_b_8351796.html

Re: "DMP is not "a bunch of 2-seat districts". It's more like "MMP, with 50/50 district/proportional seats, except to decide who gets each proportional seat you look at the district results and make sure there's one proportional seat per district"

I'm confused about DMP then. So for each riding one seat is won by FPTP and the other is awarded proportionally, not based on the proportions of that provence, but with reps dolled out proportionally to these seats provence-wide? 

Re: Bavarian MMP

We have a Equal Vote member who is an Oregonian/Bavarian dual citizen. She got to vote in their last election and reported back in great detail. It sounded really good. As good as could be if the parties actually represented the people and considering it uses a choose-one-only ballot. 

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-Sara Wolk

Chief Petitioner for "STAR Voting for Multnomah County"

Portland Equal Vote

971-222-9364

sa...@equal.vote

​www​

.

​starv​

o

​ting​

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​us​

www.equal.vote

“The fact is that FPTP, the voting method we use in most of the English-speaking world, is absolutely horrible, and there is reason to believe that reforming it would substantially (though not of course completely) alleviate much political dysfunction and suffering.”

-Jameson Quinn, Election Science expert and PhD candidate in statistics at Harvard University

[Ciaran Dougherty]

Here's a decent video on DMP, which is a bit hard to grok at first, but makes sense once you see a walkthrough

https://youtu.be/5GiYwdMjAWE

[Jameson Quinn]

I think of DMP as being "50/50 biproportional MMP". In that sense, PLACE is "Biproportional with delegated ratings". Another possibility would be "3MP" which would be like DMP but there's only one proportional seat for every 2 FPTP seats, in other words "2:1 biproportional MMP".

To Sara's questions: yes, the BC referendum is only about provincial elections; MLAs not MPs. Yes, DMP uses full provincial results to allocate second seats by party.

[parker friedland]

> So for each riding one seat is won by FPTP and the other is awarded proportionally, not based on the proportions of that provence (I think you mean constituency), but with reps dolled out proportionally to these seats
> provence-wide?

Kind of, except reps are not dolled out. If DMP says that a constituency's 2nd winner should be a Green candidate, that constituency's 2nd winner will be the green party candidate running in that constituency.

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[Sara Wolf]

Thx for those clarifications and info!

Question for all you cardinal die hards: 
1. Do you object to STV because of the ranked ballot and the fact that STV is usually paired with IRV, and you think adopting STV would hurt the quest for cardinal systems in the long run? 
2. Or do you object to STV because you don't think it yields good results? If so how do you think the results themselves would differ from your preferred system? 

3. Do you like STV?

Note: It has been explained to me that policy is often reviewed under 3 criteria. First: Merits of the proposal itself. Second: Political viability, (Does it have a shot of being adopted.) Third: Political Repercussions, (how will this effect the larger landscape if adopted.) 

[parker friedland]

> Question for all you cardinal die hards: 
> 1. Do you object to STV because of the ranked ballot and the fact that STV is usually paired with IRV, and you think adopting STV would hurt the quest for cardinal systems in the long run? 
> 2. Or do you object to STV because you don't think it yields good results? If so how do you think the results themselves would differ from your preferred system? 

> 3. Do you like STV?

I'd rather have STV then MMP. The reason why I don't like this STV proposal is because STV would only be implemented in urban cities rather then being implemented everywhere in BC and I don't support proportional representation when it isn't applied uniformly. I support proportional representation, but that doesn't mean I support electing California's electoral college delegates proportionally if it would be the only state to do so. The problem with this non-uniform application of proportional representation mixed with MMP is that unless enough voters vote honestly, the balancing reps won't be able to compensate for the disadvantage urban voters will have in the portion of parliament elected from constituency seats. This proposal relies on the hope that not enough LIB voters will realize or care about the undemocratic advantage they would have if they decided to vote for the conservative party while still voting for Lib constituencies.

[parker friedland]

> This proposal relies on the hope that not enough Lib voters will realize or care about the undemocratic advantage they would have if they decided to vote for the conservative party while still voting for Lib constituencies.

I should of said BC Libs rather then just Libs because unlike in the rest of Canada, the BC Liberal party is actually the conservative party in British Columbia.

[Ciaran Dougherty]

1. Do you object to STV because of the ranked ballot and the fact that STV is usually paired with IRV, and you think adopting STV would hurt the quest for cardinal systems in the long run? 

No, I object to STV because it is IRV for the last seat.  Sometimes that's the 28th Seat, sometimes it's the First seat (in single seat elections), but STV is susceptible to the pathologies of IRV for that last seat, because IRV is Single Seat STV.

2. Or do you object to STV because you don't think it yields good results? If so how do you think the results themselves would differ from your preferred system? 

It tends to not yield good results, because of the "Garbage In, Garbage Out" principle.  Anything using Ordinal data destroys degree of preference, which is important.  STV further ruins the input data by prohibiting equal ranks.

3. Do you like STV?

It's not horrible.  The fact that it mitigates a lot of the problems with IRV for all but the last seat is nice.  It does, however, suffer from Woodall Free-Riding (where if you prefer A & B, but know that A will probably win a seat, and that Z definitely won't, you vote Z>A>B, to ensure that your ballot will be used for A or B, whichever needs it more...)

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