David Schreck's strange opposition to BC-STV.

David Schreck is a typical BC-STV foe. Along with Bill Tieleman, he served in the Premier's office during Glen Clark's government. That government was marked by scandal and had been elected in 1996 with only 39% of the vote, receiving more seats that the BC Liberals while earning 40,000 less votes. If it had not been for our broken electoral system, he is well aware that the NDP probably would not have served back to back terms in the 1990s.

David's real fear is that smaller parties will get elected under BC-STV.

He doesn't want to see any competition from independents or the Green Party, and indicated that the current system seems to work. Although, if you read his other postings, he it strongly opposed to the unilateral actions of the current government. It is almost like he prefers bad government.

Its hard for one to imagine how anyone can believe a lack of competition in a democracy is good for the political process. When I turn on the TV, I would absolutely hate to go back to a two channel television, but when it comes to politics, there are a group of individuals who prefer giving the voter anything more than a choice between "left" and"right".

David Schreck probably knows he cannot convince other voters that British Columbia is best served by a two party electoral system. So instead, he is trying to convince voters that they must understand every single statistical possibility under BC-STV before they support it. He likes to focus on things like the droop formula (Votes/Seats+1). The droop formula may require some voters to blow the dust off their grade 8 Algebra textbooks to remember what a fraction looks like, but it is hardly some "complicated" formula as David Schreck describes it. The droop formula works to make sure as many votes count as can be realistic in an area. If there was one seat, a candidate would have to get elected by 1/2 the votes plus one. If there are three seats, a candidate would require 1/4 or 25% of the votes plus one.

David Schreck probably realized that droop is the fairest way of allocating seats in districts with 2-7 candidates, but he doesn't support any sort of fair distribution of seats so he hopes to confuse people into having second doubts.

In a recent article, "STV Makes Your Vote Worth Less", David has gone out of his way to prove that under BC-STV, every vote doesn't count. He points to a district in Ireland, Dublin North to show that the last candidate eliminated, Brendan Ryan, supporter's did not get a representative.

David may be right, in that 5256 people who chose Mr. Ryan out of 54.641 voters, may not have felt they had their vote count. that is 9.6% of voters in a 4 seat district. (Technically, about 16% of people did not choose the winners.) In that district, after all voters were counted nearly 84% of voters had one of their preferences elected. (Schreck also forgets to mention that Mr. Ryan ran with the labour party which received 10.1% of the vote and received 12% of the overall seats.)

What David fails to do is make a fair comparison to our first past the post system. He has no problem making an assertion that under BC-STV, some votes do not count. What he does not mention is that under our current system, in most election upwards of 50% of voters support a candidate who is not elected and we have no error checking mechanism to transfer any second choices.

Come on Dave.

You have a degree in economics, surely you can understand the difference between 90% of people having their votes count and 40%?

The opponents of BC-STV know they have a crappy system to defend.

David's argument is "Our existing first-past-the-post (FPTP) system is not perfect, but it is better than BC-STV."

Whoa. How is it better?

Can you talk about unqualified statements.

Watch for more fear, uncertainty and doubt from Schreck over the next few months.