Why party strategists are threatened by electoral reform

Tom Parkin on bastions and battlegrounds ...

"There’s a reason traditional political strategists argue so fervently to keep the first-past-the-post system.

Yes, it can give them 100% of the power with only 39% of the vote. But that’s not the worst.

More worrisome is the thought the beloved political bastions and battlegrounds created by the first-past-the-post system might be destroyed – rendering useless all the manipulative political strategies they’ve successfully developed to exploit them."

Strategies like ignoring voters in the 1/3 to 1/2 ridings where an election outcome is a foregone conclusion to concentrate their micro-targeting tech and pork-barrelling on just the close ridings. Strategies like dogwhistling voters into two-party strategic voting.

"Proportional representation wipes out bastions because it makes every vote count. Everyone – even in what was a bastion – has a reason to vote, and all parties now need to pay attention."

Very good article. Go.

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3rd Electoral Reform Committee meeting

Maryam Monsef, Minister of Democratic Institutions, spoke for 15 minutes and answered questions.  

Monsef acknowledges meeting taking place on traditional Algonquin territory, calls for collaboration, hopes committee will work towards more than just submitting five reports representing their respective party's views.

Gives her personal perspective on why we should move beyond FPtP. FPtP is 19th century system not designed for multi-party system. We need stronger link between will of voters and election results. Since 1960 we've had 10 elections giving majority results but only in one in 1984 did winning party receive more than 50% of the vote. This leads to lower voter turnout because of feeling their vote doesn't count.

FPtP tends to favour parties with regional rather than national appeal. 

In last election less that 40% of MPs were elected by majority of constituents, including herself, while 63% of Canadians voted for parties advocating alternative to FPtP.  So what type of system would best replace FPtP while recognizing that no one system is perfect.

Government not prepared to proceed without broad support, must reach Canadians disengaged from the electoral system. In 2016, facebook and twitter are primary tools for engagement, cannot be overlooked [Take that, Jason Kenney, not here because he's currently announcing his Unite the Right campaign for Alberta]. 

She brings up online and mandatory voting as two means of increasing participation.

She is not in favour of a referendum - they do not lend themselves to deciding complex issues and less than half of Canadians have participated in recent ones.

Stascan study after 2011 election : Under 45s, high school grads, single, unemployed, immigrants, renters, and rurals vote in lower numbers than over 45s, uni/college grads, married, employed, Canadian-born, home owners, and urbans.

A referendum would reflect these numbers, an incomplete picture of Canadians.

Previous electoral changes done without a referendum : secret ballot in 1874, began to extend voting to women in 1918, Office of Chief Electoral in 1920, FN get vote in 1960, 18 year olds get vote in 1970.  In fact all previous electoral changes have been done without a referendum.

Questions 

All CPC MPs - Scott Reid, Gerald Deltell, and Blake Richards sitting in for Jason Kenney -restricted their questions entirely to whether she would accept or put in place the necessary mechanisms to hold a referendum. Referendum, referendum, referendum. Monsef answered CPC Scott Reid that if that was what listening to Canadians and a consensus on the committee recommended, then "It would be incumbent upon me and the government to take it seriously".

Scott Reid tries again, badly wants a yes or no. She doesn't give him one.

He is particularly agitated that a referendum becomes impossible if it is not aligned with the Elections Act between when the committee winds up in December and the next election in October 2019. I'm not sure where this sense of urgency originates. Marc Mayrand told PROC in May :"Six months minimum to set up a national referendum" .. because legislation on referendums has not been updated since 1992. 

NDP David Christopherson says CPC is for FPtP, NDP is for PR, and Trudeau's favoured system is "alternate ranked voting system" plus PCO just hired ranked ballot proponent Derek Alton, so what does Monsef's pledge of wide-open options really mean?

We're not a monolith, says Monsef : 

"We haven't made up our mind about any given system.... This isn't about us; this isn't about our parties. This is about Canadians - their electoral system. ...We don't do hiring for the PCO."   

Luc Theriault, Bloc, is concerned Monsef's dept has a budget of $10.7M to conduct parallel research to the committee which only has $300K. Monsef explained Board of Internal Economy sets budget and the dept money is to reach out to people not traditionally engaged with the process.
Did he just also make a case for holding a referendum? I think he did. That shifts the committee dynamics a bit.

Elizabeth May : Liberal Speech from the Throne promised "In order to make sure every vote counts, 2015 will be the last election held under FPtP. I intend to hold you to that promise." She notes the first parliamentary committee to study PR to replace FPtP was in 1921, and another in 1937. Plus "1970 was the first time ever the identity of the candidate became subservient to the name of their party with the party named next to candidate on the ballot."

May says media focus is more on attacking the process to get rid of FPtP than on why we need to get rid of it. Yup, she's got that right, as was borne out by media questions to Monsef after she left committee. Referendum, referendum, referendum. 

May asks if majority Liberal government is willing to choose a voting system that goes against their own self-interest. 
"Will you give us your word that you will fight for whatever this committee recommends?"

Monsef does not answer yes, says she looks forward to their report. Huh. 

May reads 2 questions from twitter, one about the skewed "truth in advertizing"surrounding this debate. Monsef says debate must be non-partisan and she is counting on the good work of "our free and independent press" to present the issues fairly.   Huh.

Monsef walked out of the committee 15 minutes later to a scrum of seven questions from "our free and independent press". Five were about holding a referendum and whether or not time was running out to have one.

3rd ERRE Meeting 
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Barnstorming the strategic vote

CBC : Liberal voters in Victoria confused after candidate drops out

"Jean Oliver lives in Victoria and is a long time Green Party supporter. But in advanced polls, she decided to vote strategically, and cast a ballot for the Liberals by ticking Thomas's name.Oliver is worried that less informed voters will be casting ballots Monday based on misinformation."

I worry about that too. Three things to note here :
The "long time Green Party supporter" in the Victoria riding decides to "vote strategically" for the Liberals even though :

1.  the Liberal candidate Cheryl Thomas had withdrawn from the race three weeks before
2.  the Liberals had come in third or fourth place in that riding in the past three elections
3. the voter's first choice, the Green Party, had come second in the byelection one year before and strategic vote proponents projected a similar ranking for this election. 

In the end, 8,489 votes were strategically cast for a Liberal candidate who had dropped out, more than the party received in the previous two elections, one of them a byelection, and more than the margin of difference between the first and second place NDP and Green candidates. 

Graphic from Wikipedia










Manipulating the strategic vote ...

A month ago, "10 ridings where strategic voting might decide the election" at Global News explained how Conservatives in this same Victoria riding would benefit from voting strategically for the Green Party in order to oust the NDP incumbent : 

"Conservative voters could vote strategically, if so inclined, in Victoria, where NDP MP Murray Rankin won a close byelection over the Green Party three years ago.

A Green Party win in Victoria wouldn’t directly help the Conservatives. But it would take away one seat from the NDP—and in an election this close, one riding could make a big difference.

Two months prior, former BC Premier Gordon Campbell’s long-serving chief of staff penned a column entreating people to eschew strategic voting and vote Green Party.
In the last provincial election, the BC Liberals bought a full page ad in the Victoria Times Colonist promoting the BC Green Party leader as a principled alternative to Christy Clark in a blatant attempt to split the vote between Greens and the NDP, then leading in the polls.

All voting is tactical. Strategic voting is the moniker commonly used to mean supporting a candidate other than your sincere preference in order to block a candidate or party you dislike.

Its popularity is helped by a media happily promoting a poll-driven "who's the most popular leader/" horse-race approach which results in voters imagining they vote in their local ridings for some distant party leader.  

In December in the HoC last year, Justin Trudeau voted against an NDP motion to bring in some form of mixed member proportional representation as recommended by the federal Law Commission, stating his personal preference for a ranked ballot system that would - he did not say - mostly benefit the Liberals. He then campaigned on ending the First-Past-the-Post system that just gave his party a majority government by the same percentage the Cons got theirs last time round. 

We'll see. Electoral reform explained through Lego

Update : Kai Nagata : Strategic voting didn't defeat Harper. Voter turnout did.
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Steve : "Who wants pie?"

Another massive majority win for the Canadian Non-voting Party in by-elections this week.

"We were a bit worried that election fraud, selling Canadian resources off to China, and turning the Canadian government into an branch office of the tar sands would galvanize non-Con voters," explained a Non-voting spokesnobody, "but it turns out that feeling powerless and disenfranchised is still a winning combination for us."

Good thing they only use their awesome power for good, huh?

Alice crunches the numbers.
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Canada Votes 2011 - FPTP vs PR

Under any of the various versions of proportional representation, Steve would not now be enjoying his majority.

Fair Vote Canada :

"The Conservative party increased their vote percentage by less than two points,” says Fair Vote Canada (FVC) President Bronwen Bruch, “but this allowed them to win 24 more seats than in 2008, when they were already over-represented. Stephen Harper calls this a ‘decisive endorsement’, but we call it a rip-off."

Almost no one tries to claim the first-past-the-post voting system we are currently labouring under is fairer than any of the alternative options any more. No, mostly its proponents just say FPTP is easier for voters to understand.

Really? How did you like figuring out who to vote for this time round? And how did it work out for you?

Under any old prop rep voting system, we could forget about coalitions and party mergers and strategic voting and blaming each other for splitting the vote afterwards. Instead, all voters would be free to 'vote their conscience' and some of that 39% of eligible voters who don't bother to vote now might even feel sufficiently engaged by having, you know, an actual voice in it, to turn up.

As Pogge says : We really ought to fix this. 

Tomorrow voters in the UK are deciding whether to go with Alternative Vote , also known as instant run-off voting. Brebis Noire posted the following funny vid at Bread & Roses that explains how it works. Surprise cameo by Steve as Reform Cat.


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Canada Votes 2011

 

Just a 2% increase in the popular vote took the Cons from 143 seats in 2008 to a 167 seat majority tonight, thanks to our fucked up first-past-the-post system and because of what happened in key ridings in Ontario where presumably the Lib voters moved over to the Cons : ie. in Toronto, the Cons took 31 seats to the Libs 8 and the Dippers 12.

So the Libs and the Dippers change places in seat count compared to 2008, Elizabeth May finally gets a seat while Duceppe and Iggy lose theirs, and the Bloc, the only genuinely social democratic party in the country, is wiped out.

Consider this : Quebec's 59 seats has kept the Cons from an almost total lock on the country this time.

In 2008 the voter turnout was 59%; today it was 61%. So much for Get Out the Vote.

It will be interesting to see how Alice at Pundit's Guide breaks down the efficacy of the various strategic voting guides. In my own riding - West Vancouver-Sunshine Coast-Sea-to-Sky - the recommendation from Project Democracy, previously Vote for Environment in 2008, and other strategic voting sites was to vote Liberal. As it turned out, the Dipper came second to the winning Con who would have won anyway.

What hasn't changed since 2008?

60% of the 60% of Canadians who voted still did not vote for Harper, who has been allowed to govern as if he held a majority for five years already now. 

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CBC Interactive Results Map
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Update : Alice is up: “Splits” Decisions: A Closer Look at Vote Shifts in Greater Toronto


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Coalition Steve

Fourteen years ago Stephen Harper co-authored a passionate plea for electoral reform and coalitions - including one with the Bloc. . . CBC's Terry Milewski has unearthed a position paper written by Stephen Harper and Tom Flanagan in 1997 on the necessity of forming a coalition of conservative parties in order to overcome the "benign dictatorship" of a century of predominantly Liberal governments. . . .

Well we know how that worked out for the PC Tories - a not very benign coup by the Reform Party. But what's interesting is their acknowledgement of the Bloc/ separatists/ Quebec nationalists as necessary partners in their gaining and maintaining power in the past :

"Brian Mulroney swept to victory in 1984 by allying with Quebec separatists"

and the future :

ALONG THE TRANS-CANADA HIGHWAY FROM CALGARY TO BANFF lies a prominent mountain called The Three Sisters. Legend has it that an Indian chief placed each of his three daughters on a separate peak to keep them away from unworthy suitors. The strategy succeeded so well that the three daughters died up there. Canadian conservatism is also a family of three sisters fated to perish in isolation unless they descend from their mountain tops and embrace more realistic expectations.

After the next federal election, Canadian conservatives may begin to encourage limited cooperation between Reform and the PCs, leading to a system of sister parties.

Both the Reform party and the Bloc Quebecois, or even the PCs, could go on for decades without ever becoming national parties; and through their survival as regional parties they could prevent the emergence of a national conservative party.

The lack of any strategic alliance among the sister parties, argues Steve and Tom, leads to "a war of attrition" among them due to our first-past-the-post system.

In the longer term, however, and assuming that Quebec remains in Canada, the alliance would find it hard to form a stable government without some Quebec support. On that basis, a strategic alliance of Quebec nationalists with conservatives outside Quebec might become possible, and it might be enough to sustain a government.

None of this will be easy or even likely. But experience shows that a monolithic conservative party is unworkable; so conservatives who are unhappy with a one-party-plus system featuring the Liberals as the perpetual governing party may have little choice but to construct an alliance, at least of the two anglophone sisters, and perhaps ultimately including a third sister.

... Quebec nationalism, while not in itself a conservative movement, appeals to the kinds of voters who in other provinces support conservative parties. The Bloc Quebecois is strongest in rural Quebec, among voters who would not be out of place in Red Deer, except that they speak French rather than English.

It may be that the third sister can never be brought back in. In the last century, Quebec nationalists, content with provincial autonomy and cultural preservation, could participate in Sir John A. Macdonald's Liberal-Conservative Party -- a single party in name but a coalition in substance, always with a strong "Quebec lieutenant." But now that Quebec nationalists have discovered sovereignty, they may never again see merit in a conservative coalition."

How to fix this. What follows is a passionate plea for electoral reform and proportional representation like they have in Europe.

Our parliamentary government creates a concentrated power structure out of step with other aspects of society. For Canadian democracy to mature, Canadian citizens must face these facts, as citizens in other countries have, and update our political structures to reflect the diverse political aspirations of our diverse communities.

Only in politics do we still entrust power to a single faction expected to prevail every time over the opposition by sheer force of numbers. Even more anachronistically, we persist in structuring the governing team like a military regiment under a single commander with almost total power to appoint, discipline and expel subordinates.

Some - *cough* - more than others.

Among major democracies, only Great Britain so ruthlessly concentrates power.

In most of the rest of Europe, proportional representation ensures that coalition governments routinely form cabinets. ... In New Zealand, which used to have a Canadian-style system of concentrated power, the voters rebelled against alternating Labour party and National party dictatorships: electoral reform now ensures coalition cabinets.

Modernizing Canadian politics would not only be good for conservatism, it might be the key to Canada's survival as a nation.

It's a fascinating read. And as a bonus - sure to outrage the Con cheerleaders who bought into Steve's current coalition monkey.
Yet I wonder if part of Harper's enraged obsession around "coalitions with separatists" is due to his feeling betrayed by the "third sister" he once envisioned as part of a conservative coalition. . . .

Many thanks to Kev in comments below for the Milewski link.
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CBC poll : Yo! Canadians! Listen up!

From a live CBC online poll.

In 2003, Jean Chretien reduced the influence of special interest groups on elections by banning corporate and union donations. Private donations are capped at $1100. Arguably the best thing he ever did for Canada.

To compensate for this loss of funding, all parties who receive 2% of the vote are paid a $1.95 taxpayer subsidy per vote received, reducing the winner-take-all lopsidedness of our dumb ass first-past-the-post electoral system.
Without it the Greens would disappear, the NDP would have a much smaller voice, and fundraising would become the all-encompassing election issue it is to the south.
Very convenient for whoever is in power at the time to have fewer dissenting voices in opposition.

From Accidental Deliberations :
"Shorter Deficit Jim Flaherty : In these troubled times, opposition parties are a luxury that Canada simply can't afford."

This morning the Cons have backed down from pretending that stripping political parties of their public financing is somehow for our benefit.
Too late, jerk offs. Chretien and Broadbent are right now brokering some kind of coalition between the Bloc, the Libs, and the NDP. Good. It's a start.

Almost Anybody But Conservative

Vote For Environment is an online campaign to prevent the centre to centre-left vote-splitting that resulted in a Con victory last time round in our crappy first-past-the-post voting system.


The site looks at 63 key ridings in which a united vote to defeat the Cons would have been successful in 2006 if at least one-third of those parties' supporters had voted for the leading opposition party in their riding instead of voting their individual conscience.
Entering your postal code takes you to a map of your riding and a dropdown box of the most recent election predictions from VFE, Ekos, Nanos, and Decima, updated daily.

Of the 63 ridings, the Vote For Environment strategy would see 44 seats go to the Liberals, 11 to New Democrats, seven to Bloc candidates and one to Elizabeth May of the Green party.


Co-creators Kevin Grandia of the excellent De Smog Blog and Alice Klein of NOW mag are indeed both Libs and while they strive mightily to be party-neutral in their endorsements, dippers will certainly be disputing some of their calls, if not the entire notion of strategic voting.
It's early days yet.

YMMV.