Test Drive BC-STV

The best way to understand some things is to give it a try.  Democracy is like that.  If you still don’t have a good idea of how voting in BC-STV works or how votes are counted up why not trying voting right now online. The people at demochoice.org have created a great website where you can vote in your actual riding with  actual likely candidates and see the results.  The best way to use their site, trystv.ca, is to pick your riding, fill out your ballot and ranking every candidate and party you want to help win and click vote.  When you get to the “results” page it will show you the results of the first round of voting (everyone’s top choice, just like our current system) and the results after you vote is transferred after multiple rounds.

It is well worth it to go to the bottom of the page and click on “all rounds”.  This will lead you through each step of counting votes, eliminating candiates and transfering votes to other candidates.  There is a description at the bottom of the page for each step describing what happened at this stage.  Here is the page for the full results of Gordon Campbell’s riding which also happens to be the riding for UBC.

This is a great way to see how the process will work and let us debate the real issue of fair democracy.  This site is fun as well because they are actually storing everyone’s votes to compute the results, so the actual results at the end for your riding are an unofficial webpoll for your riding.  For the UBC riding the results seem to make sense right now at least.  As of April 13 it was three liberals (Campbell wins), two NDP and one Green.  Just imagine that.