Dan Grice's blog

The Single Transferable Vote is the best electoral system for provincial or municipal politics.

With our current system, our political system is dominated by machine politics, in which the party with the most efficient get out the vote and messaging machine will usually win the majority of the seats. Campaigns are dominated by attack advertisements and elections often focus on wedge issues which parties use to try and discredit their own opposition.

It is rare that any politician will vote against their own party or stand up for a local issue. Opposition MLAs will have more freedom, but ridings who elect an opposition MLA are often unfairly cut out of government largesse and voters in the riding have no one to hold to account.

I'm trying to understand why people oppose electoral reform. Some are opposed because they feel unfamiliar with it, but most seem to have their own agenda.

Most of those who oppose electoral reform are doing so for their own interests. Some are afraid that the "Green Party" may eat into their support base. Others fear that increased competition will take away their existing influence in government. Some enjoy the overly partisan nature of the legislature. Others don't trust voters to make their own decisions.

One of our opponents, David Schreck seems to be opposing electoral reform for the pure sake of preserving his legacy as being one of only two NDP MLAs elected in the North Shore.

In a recent web post, Bill Tieleman, a proponent of polarized politics and president of the No STV campaign, made a post on the size of the ridings under BC-STV.

Bill Claimed:

"The facts are the STV is used in just two tiny island nations as a national electoral system - Malta and Ireland.

Those two countries, who could easily fit in the bottom part of Vancouver Island"

However, "the facts" prove otherwise:

• The Republic of Ireland is 70,000 Square Kilometers.
• Vancouver Island is 32,000 Square Kilometers.
• Metro Vancouver, home to half of British Columbians is 2800 Square Kilometer

The Single Transferable Vote works by trying to interpret the true intentions of each voter and to fairly allocate seats based on those intentions. Each voter lists candidates based on their preference.

You may vote for a person from your neighbourhood or you could vote for someone who shares your values and lives in a different area within your voting district.

Once every voter has cast their votes, the election officials will count each vote to find out how many votes a candidate will need to win. If there are four seats available, each candidate will need just over 20% of the votes.

If you look at B.C. coloured by political party, you will see huge chunks of the province are red and huge chunks of the province are orange. The red areas of the province are represented by a member of the government and the orange areas are represented by a member of the opposition.



<--2005 Election Result.

What this means, is that people who live in red areas have better representation in government (and often have more money sent their way) but don't have anyone who will be vocal about bad policy. The orange areas will have someone to make a fuss whenever anything goes wrong, but they are always in opposition.