HOT NEWS: First-Past-the-Post is now unequivocally a lousy way to choose a legislature! Well, maybe the news is not all that hot. I observe I have been scooped many times by many illustrious and well-meaning people stretching back to John Stuart Mill.
Proportional Representation (called “PR” among aficionados) is often said to be more fair, more “representative”, particularly if a majority First-Past party does not receive at least 50% of the vote, as is usual in Canada. In the most recent, 2011 federal election, it did not: The Conservative majority of 54% of the seats was achieved with less than 40% of the vote. Majority government in this country very seldom means majority support, which must be judged a grievous flaw in the system, no matter which party you prefer.
Proportional Representation, however, breaks the traditional bond between the Representative to whom the People’s Authority is delegated and the People-in-the-Place that he or she is solemnly charged to represent. It places the Party between the People and the Representative in the chain of accountability, and that, I would argue, is another grievous flaw. It also, in pure form, unless arbitrary cut-offs such as 5% are employed, leads to a proliferation of small parties with relatively narrow points of view, another kind of imbalance that may not constitute the best interests of the electors as a whole any more than does First-Past.
In pursuit of the elusive Balance proponents of “PR” sometimes advocate mixed systems such as Single Transferable Vote (STV) or Mixed Member Proportional Representation (MMPR), or Preferential Ballot (PB), system, which rapidly become quite complicated and further muddy the accountability waters, these being muddy enough already under contemporary political conditions.
British Columbia held two referenda on the issue, in 2005, which came close to approving a form of STV, and in 2009, which rejected it. Ontario held one in 2007 on a form of MMPR that was also soundly rejected. Regardless of these outcomes, however, First-Past is so widely recognized as fundamentally flawed that the issue must remain alive even in those jurisdictions.
I believe that a well informed and rational voter can quite legitimately reject proposals for change which are unduly complicated and violate traditional principles of a fundamental kind on what “representation” means and how it ought to work. I think we should look for a simpler way to change.
Here’s one, which I will call “First-Two-Past-the-Post”, or “First-Two” for short. Instead of sending just one representative per riding, send two, those who come first and second.
When I tested the idea, riding by riding, on the results of the 2011 Election, I spotted only one major defect. In those provinces, such as Alberta and Saskatchewan, where voters expressed a very strong preference for one party, Two-Past skewed the results too far the other way. I therefore added a simple adjustment to my formula, applicable to any riding where the top candidate received more than 60% of the vote. I am suggesting that in those cases the winning party should be allowed to appoint a second representative, ideally in my view the person who came second in that party’s election to choose a candidate.
Here’s the final result, for the 2011 election, compared with First-Past and Proportional:
Party |
First-One-Past | Proportional | First-Two-Past |
Conservative |
166 |
124 | 133 |
NDP |
103 |
94 |
97 |
Liberal |
34 |
59 |
53 |
Bloc Québécois |
4 |
18 |
23 |
Green |
1 |
12 |
1 |
Independents |
0 | 2 |
2 |
TOTAL |
308 | 309 |
309 |
The second column is the sum of proportional representations for all provinces and territories, calculated separately. For the third I tallied the formula’s results by province and territory, yielding 616 seats, and divided by 2. The totals in the last two columns are 309 instead of 308 due to rounding-off. I chose not to admit fractional members of Parliament, even though everybody knows they are entirely feasible, perhaps common.
In 2011, under First-Past, the probability that your vote would work positively to send a particular person to Parliament would be 50.4%. Under First-Two-Past, that probability, which is a measure of the power of your preference, rises to 76.6%, an outcome which, to my mind, is a huge advantage.
I caution that these results, while strongly suggestive, are only preliminary, because they come from only one election with its own particular circumstances. I will go back further in the weeks ahead, and publish the results as they emerge.
Under a Two-Past system, retaining the same number of ridings would require doubling their size, which is some disadvantage. I would recommend that we mitigate it by merging the House of Commons and the Senate into one Parliament with what would have been, in the 2011 Election, 413 ridings, distributed according to our customary practice. Under the most recent re-distribution the result would be 443 ridings (338 from the Commons, 105 from the Senate).
I suggest that this reform would make a suitable sesquicentennial project for 2017, with a redistribution based on the 2016 Census.
If Proportional Representation sets the highest standard of fairness to parties, the Two-Past system using my formula cannot truly be said to be grotesquely unfair to any party except the Greens, who after all received nearly 600,000 votes, and in 2008 close to a million. I suggest, however, that by opening up the opportunity to enter Parliament by coming second, a measure of greater fairness to developing parties would follow.
But fairness to parties is not the standard, nor some notion of “perfection” that is certainly unattainable. We should seek a balanced system in which the majority of the voting people are fairly represented. First-Past no longer meets this standard, and cannot, because we now have three strong parties nationally, with a fourth perhaps emerging, and another strong one regionally in Québec. Regardless of what becomes of the Green Party and the Bloc, First-Past will remain a bad system unless either the NDP or the Liberals disappear, which seems unlikely. Labels may shift, but I think right, left and centre are political orientations firmly established among voters and most likely to persist. Only by blatant manipulation of a bad system would we be able to suppress one of them in Parliament.
First-Two-Past-the-Post: a simple, more balanced system consistent with our traditions. I will return to this topic when I have analyzed another election, and continue the process until the case is persuasive, one way or the other. In the meantime, I invite comments.