Committee studying Canadian electoral reform gets lessons from abroad

Nationalpost.com
July 27, 2016
By Marie-Danielle Smith

Canadian members of a special committee studying electoral reform are looking overseas to find out how alternative voting systems have affected other Commonwealth countries.

Witnesses from Ireland, Australia and New Zealand appeared at marathon sittings of the committee Tuesday as part of MPs’ summer study of alternative voting systems.

Part of the study includes identifying how to “engage” voters in any change, leaving the door open for recommending a referendum - which is the method New Zealand, for its part, used to legitimize a change to how people vote.

Conservative MPs, including Jason Kenney - who attended committee meetings this week despite recently announcing his foray into Alberta provincial politics - have consistently gunned for a referendum. The Liberals, NDP and Greens haven’t been so keen.

Short of tweeting questions in the hopes MPs will ask them in committee - and short of consulting the Liberals’ event-planning toolkit on hosting “dialogues” - people can submit papers or requests to appear before the committee until Oct. 7.

A final report will be published by Dec. 1.

IRELAND: ‘You should be pleased’ about coalition governments

Ireland uses the single transferable vote. In ridings of three to five members of parliament, voters rank their favourite candidates on a ballot that includes several candidates for each political party.

Candidates with the fewest first-choice votes are eliminated, with votes going towards those electors’ second choices instead.

For candidates who get more first-choice votes than they need to become members of the legislature, surplus votes are distributed proportionally to other candidates based on voters’ second choices.

It sounds complicated, Trinity College Dublin professor Michael Gallagher told Canadian MPs, and the votes take longer to count, but it means “fairly accurate representation” with no votes wasted.

“It performs to the satisfaction of people here. Most governments these days are coalitions, but they can be just as stable as single-party governments,” said Gallagher - with the exception of Ireland’s most recent election, which produced an unstable political situation.

What would a system like this mean for Canada? Gallagher and his Trinity colleague Michael Marsh said we’d have fewer, bigger ridings, represented by several MPs. And though it might be “awkward” at first, Canadians would have to get used to the idea of coalition government.

On the point of forming coalition governments rather than swinging from one major party to another, Marsh said, “rather than being concerned about it, you should be quite pleased.”

AUSTRALIA: Should people be required to vote?

In Australia, both houses of parliament are elected.

The upper house is elected by single transferable vote. The lower house uses the alternative vote, which uses a ranked-ballot system where candidates with the least votes are dropped off the bottom of the list until the top candidate has 50 per cent.

During a Q&A session following committee testimony, Reid told a story about seeing a candidate named “Pauline Pantsdown” on the Senate candidates list while living in Australia - making the point that it’s pretty easy to sign up. Whether any joke resumes have been received by the Privy Council Office for applications to Canada’s Senate remains unclear.

But one of the more serious issues Canadian MPs are examining is whether to implement a mandatory vote. That’s the case in Australia, and has been since 1924.

About 70 per cent of people support the concept, 90 per cent of people end up voting and about five per cent of votes are “informal,” meaning they have been filled out incorrectly and aren’t counted, Australia’s electoral commissioner, Tom Rogers, explained to Canadian MPs.

“This is seen as a normal part of Australian political culture,” said Rogers.

Other witnesses at the committee, including those from Ireland, noted there’s a “donkey vote” effect - some voters rank candidates in the order they’re presented on the ballot, whether because of ignorance or in protest. One way Australia limits the effect of this trend is randomizing the order in which candidates appear on different ballots.

NEW ZEALAND: Referendum means ‘informed vote’

New Zealand offers an interesting modern example for Canadian legislators, since they changed their voting system from first past the post via referendum in the mid-’90s.

Their system is called mixed-member proportional. Voters make two choices: first, they pick the political party that they want to support. Then, they pick the local candidate they would like to represent them. Local candidates, who make up a little more than half of the legislature, win via first past the post.

The rest of the seats are filled according to parties’ percentage of the popular vote. The threshold is high enough to limit the ability of tiny parties to proliferate - parties require five per cent of the popular vote, or the election of at least one local candidate, to be represented in parliament.

The decision was made with two referendums. In 1992, voters (55 per cent of whom participated) were asked if they wanted to make a change (85 per cent wanted to), and regardless of whether they wanted it or not, which alternative system they would prefer (70 per cent chose mixed member proportional).

At the same time as the 1993 federal election, voters were told to choose between first past the post or mixed member proportional, and 54 per cent chose the latter.

Another referendum in 2011 asked voters to confirm that choice once again, and 57 per cent said they’d like to keep the mixed member proportional system in place.

“The process of reform is very important,” Peden said, in maintaining public “trust and confidence in the outcome” - and changes are confirmed by the “informed vote” of citizens in a referendum.

There should always be “plenty of opportunity for public input, public consultation and public education,” he said. He noted the change required enormous effort: legislative updates, committees, public consultations, redrawing electoral boundaries, changing party nomination processes and launching a major public education campaign.

SCOTLAND: Fancy four different voting systems?

Though no Scottish witnesses appeared in committee, Scotland was brought up as an example of another region that has had experience with various types of voting systems.

The way things stand now, Scottish voters must juggle several different types of voting systems for their local governments (single transferable vote), the Scottish parliament (mixed-member proportional or additional member), the United Kingdom’s parliament (first past the post) and European Union representation (list proportional representation).

Marsh, from Ireland, noted that before the single transferable vote system was introduced in Scotland, many voters said “this sounds very complicated.” But Irish voters have been at it for almost a century, “and they do it perfectly easily.” Now, Scotland manages just fine.

That’s a lesson, Marsh suggested: it’s easy to “exaggerate the complexity” of voting under a new system, something that some have suggested would confuse a referendum result.