Ok, I’ve been trying to not write this for days and it keeps getting both harder to avoid and harder to write.  The topic is UBC AMS politics.  This is why its hard to write, because campus politics has a way of making sometimes hokey municipal politics look like a grand ideal of civil debate.  UBC campus politics seems to have an endless layer upon layer of intrigue going back year after year.  It’s hard to avoid because this blog is ostensibly about democracy and UBC students.  What could be a more apt topic than a political scandal involving the AMS President sending a letter to the UN asking for an investigation into “human rights violations” on UBC campus?

Seems relevant.  So why is it I can’t seem to pick a side?

Point, the first.

Last fall I asked Blake Frederick not to step down in the wake of his first scandal.  That scandal, SlateGate?,  happened before he was even confirmed president in a complaint that he was running as part of a banned slate.  Well now Mr. Frederick and Tim Chu, the VP External,  are both being asked to step down again.  This time however, it is by the AMS council in a unanimous censure of his letter to the UN.  As you have no doubt heard already (check here, here, here and here is you want the full scope of disgust, misunderstanding, facts and support), those “human rights violations” regard the increasingly high tuition fees at UBC which, they argue, are in contravention of the international convenent of human rights of which Canada is a signatory.

I didn’t want Frederick to step down because he was the best winnable choice for president who might vigorously help to get the AMS behind the campaign to pass the referendum on proportional representation.  Despite the best efforts of FairVoteUBC the AMS council did not endorse BC-STV and as we all know it failed to pass provincewide, achieving only 40% support.  Remember, correlation does not imply causation, just saying...

So, Frederick’s argument that the AMS council is not exactly interested in making any kind of statements, even when it is in favour of perfectly rational proposals such as BC-STV which was widely supported by young people and would benefit students disproportionately to many other groups (pun intended).

But…

That brings me to my second point.  This proposal, to ask the UN to investigate BC for “human rights violations” due to rising tuition fees is not an obviously rational and effective proposal.  It’s not clear it makes any sense, it demeans the notion of human rights and it’s not clear that it will be effective.  Oh, scratch that, it is clear because SFU did the same thing 5 years ago and never heard a peep from the UN. Its just a bit silly really.

Third point, Frederick and Chu sent this request to the UN, without getting approval of the AMS council.  They have since apologized, but not really. Their argument is that the council isn’t activist enough and that their attempt to impeach him is an attempt by a small group of students to overthrough the democratic will of UBC students.

Arguing that you needed to go around the rules government because the government wasn’t doing things the way you want isn’t what elected presidents say, its what dictators say.  So I was surprised Frederick made that argument.  Arguing that the president’s 6% of the campus population vote tally is more legitimate than the small band of AMS councillors, who are also elected, is not very compelling.

So what’s my conclusion? Should Frederick resign? It looks like 2 strikes against Frederick and 1 strike against the AMS council.  But I’m enough of a Bayesian to think there’s a whole lot I still don’t know about all this, and frankly, I’m not sure I want to.

So my advice to Frederick, Chu, the other execs and the AMS council: grow up and start talking to each other, put your personality battles aside or step aside if you can’t handle it.  Also, step back and get some perspective here, we all want to change the world for the better, how can you best improve the lives of the students you claim to represent?

Mark Crowley

Do you believe in democracy?  Do you feel the voice of students at UBC and voters across the city, province and country are not being represented because of institutional problems with our voting and political systems?

If you said yes and you are interested in campus politics and like writing then get in touch with us! We need writers!  (email to fairvoteubc  at symbol gmail dot symbol com )

Last year FairVoteUBC was a voice for progressive change in our voting system working to get proportional voting passed for voting on campus and organizing to support the BC-STV referendum.  Read through our past posts to get a sense of what we’re about.  If you agreee with some of what we said last year you could be one of our writers this year.  If you are accepted as a writer you will have total freedom for your own articles.  The hope is that we can get a few people to cover the upcoming AMS elections on campus and other democratic deficit issues concerning students.

If we can then we could enter the VFM competition for next year.  For our election coverage last year we received $700 but we also won the regular, smaller VFMs for several months before election season.

FairVoteUBC is an ally to other fairvote organizations such as FairVoteBC and Fair Vote Canada but is not officially a member or constrained by those organizations.

Please let us know if you are interested.

Mark Crowley – FairVoteUBC Webmaster

Reposting from my blog about UBC Professor Michael Byers’ proposal for how to the NDP and Liberals could get our democracy out of the funk it’s in with a little creative thinking.

Its that time of year again, the kids are buying their supplies, the buses are filling up, the lectures are starting, the private jets are being booked and painted…that’s right, its time for another federal election!  What did you think I was talking about, yes school is starting too I suppose.

UBC is starting to fire up and soon it will be swarming with young people excited about learning …   Statistically they will probably be even less excited about a federal election.  Many young people are disconnected and cynical about our democracy.  This is understandable given the very disappointing result of the last BC election.  I don’t mean the party result, I’ll stay neutral about that, I mean the BC-STV referendum result.  Young people overwhelmingly supported switching BC’s electoral system to a proportional one that would have more fairly represented the wishes of the electorate.  Unfortunately, their parents believed the fear mongering and voted it down giving only 40% support when 60% was needed.

It’s easy to become depressed about changing the world when you can’t even make a sensible change to your own province.  There has been lots of discussion of what went wrong with that campaign but the truth is, in one sense, it doesn’t matter why it failed.  We need to keep trying to change our democracy, to improve it, to move it into the 21st century where we, all of us at UBC especially, will spend the bulk of our lives.  We live in a 21st century democracy with a 19th Century electoral process.  There are many ways it can be fixed, and all of us who want change need to work together for some change regardless of the details.  Any progress is progress.

So this year at UBC, we at the FairVoteUBC club will be asking you to put aside apathy and cynicism about democracy.  About politics sure, but not democracy.  We’ll likely be having a federal election before we even have our first term exams.  Then in the the spring we’ll have a campus election.  Last year we used a proportional system for the first time on campus, Condorcet ranked voting. Will we do so again this year, can we do even better? Can we use an STV style system to show everyone that we were not happy with the referendum result?  Can we send a louder message to Vancouver, to Victoria, to Ottawa?  Can we demand that the politicians who will be coming to woo us on this campus make electoral reform a top priority?

We need your help to find out.  We need your ideas. We need your energy. Let us know if you’ll join us (face/twit). And we’ll let you know where to find us on campus soon.

A fantastic new site has just appeared in the wilds of the Social Media-sphere, Parliament2. The site is not run by parliament (booo, parliament) but is brought to you by the makers of PoliTwitter and Blogging Canadians. It lets Canadians propose, discuss and rank any priorities important to them.  The hopeis to send a message to parliament about what Canadians value and let the people actually discuss topics of interest and weigh the pros and cons.  Its democracy for the social media age, I strongly encourage you to go take a look. Its currently still very new so now is the time to make a mark in this new community.

For #fairvoters, the “Proportional representation and fairness in voting” priority is currently ranked 15, surely we can take it higher.

Reposted email sent out to UBC students

Graduate Student Society stands with its Iranian Students at UBC and
would like to give its sincere condolence to the loss of the students
who lost their lives during the protest in Iran. We recognize that many
of our graduate students may have family, friendship, professional and
research ties in the region. If you require assistance or support in
light of this difficult situation, Graduate Student Society has an
Advocacy cell which can be contacted.

Ph 604-822-3173
Mrigank Sharma
VP Academic & External
vpexternal@gss.ubc.ca
(604) 822-3173

From the people at Fair Vote BC:

Thank you for your support of BC-STV and electoral reform in the referendum last month. We are all disappointed that we did not win. However, as reform is still essential, we are picking ourselves up, dusting ourselves off, and moving on.

We want your ideas at the June Conference

Will you continue to help? The next two steps are:

1. Contribute ideas to our pre-conference website at http://www.fvbcfuture.pbworks.com, and
2. Bring your energy to our Referendum Review and Future Strategies Conference in Surrey on June 20, 21. To register for the conference go to: http://fvbcreflections.eventbrite.com

Whether you can attend this conference in person or not, we need your ideas and input to ensure that our deliberations reflect the opinions of our en tire supporter base.  To facilitate this, we have created a wiki-type website at www.fvbcfuture.pbworks.com.

You can gain access to this site by visiting it and clicking on “request access” to receive a user name and password. There, you can submit both questions or issues you’d like to see addressed by FVBC and proposals you have for how we can most effectively move forward. Those attending the conference should see themselves as representatives of all supporters, and as such, they should bring to the conference the suggestions from their colleagues. Those suggestions are extremely important and will be grist for the conference on Sunday, but only to the extent that they propose them.

I re-posted a scathing yet painfully true analysis by Benoit, a volunteer from North Van, on my other blog as well as some of my own ideas of what went wrong.

But we all need hope and we need to all stick together and figure out what comes next,  especially for the online masses who are so incredibly behind reform.  So, if you aren’t willing to admit defeat, then you can do a few things right now:

1. Join Fair Vote Canada if you haven’t already
2. Join these facebook groups to show your support and discuss the next steps for change :
   • Canadians for Democratic Change
   • Fair Vote Canada
   • Electoral Reform in Canada
3. If you’re really keen want and have a social media footprint you want to leverage for this cause join the discussion on this wiki.

And above all, don’t lose hope, and don’t let people tell you that now its decided for all time because people don’t want change.  That’s not what they were asked!

Mark Crowley

Below are merely some of my (Bruce Krayenhoff’s) opinions on the 2009 BC-STV referendum and the future of electoral reform

Referendum Results Discussion – Mistakes in the Referendum Campaign

Why did BC-STV fail miserably this time around? Conditions for electoral reform were much less favorable this time around.  The 2005 election results weren’t as clearly ‘wrong’ to the general voter as the 2001 results, the Citizens’ Assembly was no longer fresh in people’s minds, people were afraid of change because of the financial crisis, and, most importantly, there was a funded ‘No side’.

Referenda in General: I am quite interested in direct democracy in addition to electoral reform, and have read quite a bit about it (several years ago).  It is not uncommon for good initiatives to be voted down by a confused public, particularly when a lot of money is being spent for and against the initiative.  Unless the proposal is very simple (And changing to a more proportional voting system is not), the public by and large does not spend the time to understand the complexities of the proposal, is easily confused, and tends to vote for the status quo.  In fact, I’ve heard from my Uncle that referenda are sometimes defeated by ‘confusion campaigns’ in the US – the ‘No side,’ says all sorts of different things which are sometimes contradictory or false, confusing the public and ultimately securing a vote for the status quo.

The ‘No’ Side: In BC we did hear some lies (i.e. about the Citizens’ Assembly thinking FPTP is fair) and contradictory statements (i.e. about proportionality) from the No Side, but by-and-large most of what we heard was dubious claims, spin, cherry-picking of facts, and some very misleading but technically correct statements.  I think there are a few actual downsides to BC-STV, but the ‘No Side’ didn’t focus on these.  The one thing that I do agree with is that BC-STV counting is complex when compared to that of FPTP.  But it’s simple enough to do by hand and can be scrutineered, so I see this as a problem only when trying to sell it to a public that is unfamiliar with it.  Also, I’ve never entirely understood northerner’s concerns with bigger ridings (Nor the No side’s if they actually have one), and the Citizens’ Assembly members from northern BC did prefer not to have single-seaters, so I’m not convinced there’s a real issue here.

How could the campaign have been run better? I learned early on that most people aren’t interested in spending much time learning/thinking about BC-STV, and without some understanding of STV and its history it would be near impossible for them to distinguish between valid and invalid arguments for/against it.  The only way that we could sell STV to these people IMO is to tell the story of the Citizens’ Assembly – of how BC-STV was designed by voters for voters through a very in-depth learning and deliberation process.  Ideally, the BC-STV campaign would have been run under a name like “Friends of the Citizens Assembly,” with Citizens’ Assembly Alumni as spokespeople and in charge (with lots of support from everyone else).  Otherwise, why should people trust us more than the ‘No Side’?  Unfortunately, the Citizens’ Assembly was not emphasized by the yes side.

Also, the yes campaign provided less information in its literature than I would have liked – which could have helped win over opinion leaders and laid a better basis for future electoral reform efforts.

The Future of Electoral Reform in BC

Provincially: Sadly BC-STV and most likely electoral reform will not be revisited provincially for a few decades.  The NDP promised that if BC-STV failed to reach 60% it would hold a referendum on MMP, which could only be intended to kill the issue permanently while making the NDP look good.  I have heard from NDPers that, while the membership is receptive and even passed a policy supporting MMP, most influential NDP insiders (Like Bill Tieleman and David Schreck who pretty much ran the No campaign) are dead against proportional representation.  An MMP system designed by politicians would IMO fail far worse than BC-STV, and that would be the end of it.

Ultimately, our system will again produce some very skewed election results, and electoral reform will be revisited in BC.

Municipally and in Smaller Organizations: One reason why the No campaign was so effective is that STV is very unfamiliar to most British Columbians, so they could claim whatever they wanted and most people wouldn’t know better.  Perhaps reform could be started at the municipal or smaller level where there are also many problems with the current voting system.  Then, with raised familiarity, reform at higher levels of government will come more easily.  At this point in time it may be necessary to promote other systems such as SPAV (Sequential Proportional Approval Voting) which have not had their names blackened, which is unfortunate, since they aren’t quite as good as STV.

In particular, at the university level support for voting reform is strong, student politicians don’t have a strong vested interest in their current voting systems, and there is interest in fairer results and in engaging more students in students politics.  All that is needed is a bit of support/interest from someone who is knowledgeable about voting systems and about the Open STV software.  I think this is a good place to start! (Or in my case continue).  [Edit: Vancity and MEC are also apparently good places to start - Vancity now uses multi-member plurality, which is horrible!]

Federally: Federally the need for electoral reform is very clear, and could possibly be implemented by a Liberal-NDP majority coalition.

P.S. I recall a Citizens’ Assembly member saying that initially he thought STV was all about formulas, but when they figured out what it did then they started to like it more.  So STV is definitely not the easiest thing to sell to an inattentive public.

P.P.S. While I am critical of some of the decisions they made (not emphasizing the Citizens’ Assembly), I do want to thank the directors of British Columbians for BC-STV for their hard work.

The referendum to bring in a new age of democracy in BC failed last night, the battle, lost.  As we wake up this morning we must realize that the war is not over, it has only just begun for many of us.

Thousands of people across BC and Canada have been woken up to the need for change in the past year.  I had never been involved in politics until last fall when the arguments about the Coalition awoke me to the widespread lack of understanding of our democracy.  Now I have experienced first hand with many others how hard it is to bring about change.

But change is needed.

From the artificial choice between two parties in BC to the continuing minority trials in Ottawa to the growing attention on vote swapping it is clear that our democracy is broken and voters know it. Dispersed voices, such as the Greens are not heard.  Concentrated voices such as the Bloc are heard beyond their actual strength.  Everywhere, voter turnout is lower than ever before and the choices presented to the voter seem more and more meaningless.

So brace yourself, and take a look at the official results:
http://results.elections.bc.ca/REF-2009-001.html

(make sure you look at which cities voted, the areas with the most volunteers, Victoria and Vancouver, did much better. One next step could be to get those city councils to institute STV for municipal elections)

Even StudentVote, which gives high school and elementary students the opportunity to practice voting didn’t do much better. Young people generally support reform more than older people but these students still did not have nearly enough support to pass the reform:

http://www.studentvote.ca/bc/results2009/index.php

To make you feel a bit better, or maybe worse, take a look at these results of how this election might have turned out if we’d been using STV.

Someday soon, the media, the politicians and the Canadian public will connect these dots and realize change is needed. Now our job is to continue working to make that happen.

I have been so honoured to work with and have been deeply impressed by all of the people I have met while volunteering to campaign for STV.  The response online was especially robust but even on the street I can remember the dozens of people who had that lightbulb of hope go off right in front of me.  And of course many people gave money to help the campaign, I wasn’t involved in that but it was essential to get the level of visibility we did achieve.  Thank you to everyone who helped in any way. We did a good thing, and now it seems it was just one  battle of many to come.  But we shall not surrender.

If you aren’t willing to admit defeat either, then you can do two things right now

1. Join Fair Vote Canada if you haven’t already
2. Join this facebook group : Canadians for Democratic Change to keep the discussion going and let the politicians and the media know what Canadian voters demand out of democracy and their representatives.

Today is the day we move democracy in Canada into the 20th Century.  Yes, we’re overdue, we’ve been living with an 18th century system for too long and most of the world has already moved on.  I’m excited, scared and hopeful.  Will British Columbians look at this very sensible voting system, BC-STV and make a very sensible choice.  I have to believe so.  If not, then I’ll drown my sorrows tonight, I’ve been saving up my Canucks mourning from last night’s game, so I can get it all out at once.

But it doesn’t have to be that way!  Democracy isn’t like hockey, there doesn’t have to be a winner and a loser.  Everyone can win if we believe it and make a rational choice.  That’s what STV is all about, finding a way to let everyone have a say and stop running democracy like its a horserace.  Democracy is about representation not about winning and losing.  When we vote, we are trying to select sensible people to represent us.  Under STV you get to help select 3-7 people rather than just one.  Who can argue with that?

So if you haven’t already, get out and vote for STV, and I guess vote for a party too if you can figure out who to choose.  But if we make the right decision, then  next time it will be different.  Next time, you’ll be able to vote honestly and know that your vote won’t be wasted.

If you are on twitter please consider adding a few tweets today with the #bcstv tag and the #bcelection tag, I’d love to see it trending today on the twitter sidebar or on What the Trend, last night half the trending topics were about the Chicago – Vancouver hockey game, so don’t say we can’t do it.

Good luck BC — the rest of Canada is watching, lets show them what the West beyond the West can think outside the box.

Below is an email about the BC-STV referendum by Craig Henschel, a Citizens’ Assembly Alumnus that I have worked with and think very highly of.

Also, here is an absolutely excellent 6.5min video by Christie Clark about why she supports STV now that she is no longer a politician.
–
-Bruce

Apologies for the spamishness of this e-mail.  Please pass this on to your address book by Bcc.

Hi,

As you know, there will be a Provincial Referendum on Tuesday May 12^th to determine which electoral system we will use in future provincial elections, First-Past-the-Post (FPTP) or the Single Transferable Vote (BC-STV) as recommended by the BC Citizens’ Assembly on Electoral Reform.

You may recall that I was a member of the Citizens’ Assembly.  I’m sending you this e-mail so that you will make a more informed choice on May 12^th.  I’m also hoping that you might forward this e-mail on to your friends.

Attached is a flyer I wrote myself.  It provides the most concise information about BC-STV that I could fit onto two pages.  As a member of the Citizens’ Assembly, I thought this perspective might be helpful to voters.

A complete but concise argument: BC-STV is the better system.

BC-STV vs FPTP (see attached flyer)

The simplest argument: Who are you going to trust, voters or people with something to lose?

The 2001 Provincial Legislature determined that the current First-Past-the-Post electoral system is severely flawed and unanimously created the BC Citizens’ Assembly on Electoral Reform to find a better electoral system.

The Assembly was composed of 160 randomly selected, ordinary, non-partisan voters who spent 11 months learning about electoral systems, consulting with the public and examining how electoral systems work in practice (including all the No STV campaign accusations/issues).

By a 95% consensus, the Assembly recommended to their fellow voters that we adopt the BC-STV electoral system because it would provide:

1. Fair representation (the percentage of seats a party gets would be close to the percentage of votes a party gets),

2. Vastly improved local representation and accountability,

3. More voter choice,

4. More power for voters in determining government policy,

5. Representation by an MLA you voted for (80%+ with BC-STV vs. 50%^+/_ with FPTP),

6. Stable government and effective public policy development.

On the other hand, there are the opponents of BC-STV who are almost entirely comprised of ex-MLAs, political insiders, party strategists, big business and big labour; precisely the people BC-STV would be taking power away from.

The No STV ads in the papers, radio and TV are full of inaccuracies, misleading statements and outright lies (I hate to have to say it).  Disappointing?  Yes.  Surprising?  Actually, I was surprised.  Their campaign is about creating fear and division.  Haven’t we had enough of that?

As Members of the Citizens’ Assembly, it would have been virtually impossible for us to mislead the public in this way.  Firstly, we had and have nothing at stake, and secondly, our transparent public process wouldn’t have allowed it.

If BC-STV was really as bad as they portray it, could it ever have been recommended by 160 dedicated voters who worked on the problem for almost a year?  The No STV’s fabricated case against BC-STV is simply way over the top.  We would have had to have been smoking something to have recommended the system they portray as STV.

So, who should we trust?  Ordinary voters or political insiders who would say and do anything to keep their influence?

Do we want a simple system, or one that works properly?  It’s your choice.

Fact sheets:

Citizens’ Assembly Fact Sheet

BC-STV Fact Sheet

BC-STV Counting Process

Some good videos:

Citizens’ Assembly and Animation from 2005 (Description of BC-STV system, voting and counting)

Christie Clark

John Cleese (a UK humorous perspective on STV)

Other Videos

Websites to visit:

www.STV.ca (Has a nice video about the “complicated” counting system)

www.CitizensAssembly.bc.ca (for original documentation of the Assembly process)

www.STVinfo.ca/ (Fact sheets, videos and other helpful info)

I hope this helps.  The best vote is an informed vote.

If you have found this useful, please pass it on to your friends.

Thanks.

Craig Henschel

Member, BC Citizens’ Assembly on Electoral Reform

Supporting the Recommendation of The BC Citizens’ Assembly on Electoral Reform.

Make Your Vote Count.  Support BC-STV.

Hey there.  One more day to go.  Tomorrow is the big vote and we’ll see if the forces of reason win out over the forces of fear and lack of information (its a weak force )

Take  a look at the events map, there are some people planning to cover skytrains in vancouver and maybe bridges too so that no one can get home tonight without having to think about BC-STV again, at least for a second.

If you haven’t already, take a look at this video from Christy Clark, former Deputy Premier of BC and current host on CKNW.  Be sure to rate it with five stars and leave a comment. This has drawn some attention and some people think it may be turning the tide in our favour.  We’ll see tomorrow night.

This is a great list of famous people, smart people and fantastic community people who support BC-STV. Take a look!  My favourite part is this subset of the list of Canadians outside BC:

• Maude Barlow, National Chairperson, Council of Canadians
• Andrew Coyne, journalist, Macleans, National Post columnist
• Bruce Cox, Executive Director, Greenpeace Canada
• Kim Elliott, Publisher, rabble.ca
• Andrea Horwath, Leader, Ontario NDP
• Tom Kent, former chief advisor to Liberal Prime Minister Lester Pearson
• Naomi Klein, author
• Preston Manning, former Reform Party leader
• Elizabeth May, leader Green Party of Canada
• Farley Mowat, author
• Walter Pitman, former NDP MP, former President, Canadian Civil Liberties Assoc.
• Hugh Segal, Senator, Conservative Party, former PC leadership candidate
• Lois Wilson, former President, World Council of Churches, former Senator
• (US) Krist Novoselic, musician, formerly of Nirvana, currently Chair, Fair Vote (US)

Never thought I’d see Naomi Klein, Preston Manning, Elizabeth May and Farley Mowat together in any list of any kind.

Go BC-STV!….and go Canucks!

Two fantastic articles/posts in the last 24hours from influential people in the media that you should read before you go to bed tonight, you’ll rest a bit better knowing there is reason and sanity in the world. Then get out there and spread the word for a few days more.

Andrew Coyne (editor : Macleans Magazine) : A Vote That Really Counts

Christy Clark (Host on CKNW and former BC Deputy Premier) : Why I’m Supporting STV — youtube video

I think the online buzz and opinion making for BC-STV is pretty solid at this point.  Letters are flooding onto websites of newspapers and blogs and twitter is all, well, a-twitter about the benefits of BC-STV.  Of course, the internet doesn’t get a vote and you can’t send in your ballot via twitter (yet) and there are some people out there not buzzing around online talking about the election.  Actually, most people aren’t.  This weekend most people will be shopping, attending conventions, street festivals and hockey games.

So we need to be there.

We need to get out of cyberspace and get into meatspace and talk to people using modulated soundwaves in the air.  We need to ask them to consider this important choice, offer them pamphlets to read more, tell them about the website to find videos and just plain-old answer their questions and assuage their fears, because there is nothing to be scared of except staying with FPTP forever.

So this is a call to everyone online, to go offline at some point in the next 4 days and connect with some real, physical people.  If everyone one of us online can convince 10 people and raise awareness of 100 people we might be able to actually do this thing.  Of course, we’ll use the internet to organize that

Flyers : Here are some great flyers to print out about BC-STV. Print 100 and give them out this weekend.

Map : Here’s a map with the locations of some of BC-STV events that need volunteers or where people plan to be talking to pedestrians.  It will grow in the next few days, so far its just vancouver, but anyone in BC can use it.  If you have a gmail account you can edit it yourself and add your plans.  Maybe people will show up to help.

Pass the link on to your friends and add stuff to the map, then get out there and talk to people, the link is http://tinyurl.com/bcstvevents

First of all a confession, without any shame, I am a Star Trek geek.  I don’t dress up as a Klingon or anything, but I like it a lot.  So in the next week there are two exciting things going on: 1) the biggest election of my lifetime (so far) with a real chance to begin the process of electoral reform in Canada on May 12 and 2) the Star Trek prequel movie is coming out which could lead to the rebirth of a healthy Star Trek storyline.

Are these two passions related in any way?  Not really, but that won’t stop me! Because it occurred to me the other day that the electoral system that a society chooses to use says a lot about what they value in democracy and it influences the way their society grows by giving different incentives to leaders.  So, the thought experiment for Star Trek fans is, which electoral systems would the civilizations in the Star Trek universe use?

I’m going to tell you what I think but first we need a few ground rules.  Lets assume every Star Trek civilization has some form of representative democracy that involve an election system of some kind.  We’ll try to limit ourselves to existing electoral systems in use around the world or plausible ones that could be created.  Here is a map of electoral systems in use around the world right now and the wikipedia page on electoral systems to give you an idea of what they are.

I’ll update the page as I think of more and you should feel free to add comments here on what I got wrong or right or what the races I missed would use.  You can also join the discussion on twitter with #startrekstv.

Note: to star trek pedants, I realize star trek STV sounds like I may be talking about the “movie” Star Trek V: the Final Frontier, but since I have decided to ignore the entire existence of that horrible film and there is no reason to talk about said film I didn’t think it would be too confusing.

The Electoral Systems of the Races of Star Trek

Klingons - FPTP – Clearly the Klingons would use a single member plurality system, or First-Past-The-Post (FPTP), which is used currently in Canada, US, Britain, India and a few other places.  FPTP is winner take all, you don’t need consensus, or a majority you just need to be the strongest one in the room and the last one standing.  Is it an honourable system?  Its simple and I suppose it seems honourable if honour is equivalent to strength for you rather than wisdom or fairness.  In addition to FPTP used on Earth of course, the Klingons would not just throw away all the votes for the losing candidates, they’d have the losing candidates killed, fair’s fair.

Romulans – Closed List MMP – The Romulans are a logical bunch, a trait they got from their Vulcan ancestors, and they actually do have a democracy in Star Trek with a Roman style senate.  However, they don’t seem too interested in grass roots movements or losing control of the central levers of power. So it seems like the Romulans would use a robust proportional system that placates the people but then rig it so that they have as much control over who wins as possible.  One way to do that is to use a list proportional system like Mixed Member Proportional but instead of openly published lists, which is what we normally do on Earth and is  a good idea, the Romulans would have closed, secret lists chosen by the party.  Of course, in addition to that, the ‘parties’ in the Romulan Senate are probably just fronts that pretend to hate each other to convince the electorate there is competition.

Vulcans – ??? – I’m still undecided on what the  Vulcans would use. Vulcans are very logical so perhaps they’d use the most reasonable and logical system, STV.  But they probably aren’t actually interested in fairness as much as balance so they may aim for something that is less combatative than a standard electoral system, something that requires a great deal of consensus or even a unanimous vote.  One idea is that they would use an electoral college system that always requires unanimous votes.  Once a local representative is chosen they go to the central legislature and analyse policies until unanimity is reached.  One thing I’m sure of is they would not allow campaign advertising which tends to play on emotions or a long campaign period.  The various candidates would list their policies in detail.  Then all citizens would have a week to study them and then choose, without discussion, the most logical candidates.

Ferengi – Pure Capitrocracy – The Ferengi are definetly not interested in fairness, voter choice or even the most logical choice.  They want to be lead by those with the best business acumen who can increase the profits of the empire the most.  So, every four years the government would be replaced by the CEOs of the most profitable corporations of the previous four years. Ministerial jobs such as Environment would be selected based on the leading corporations from different industries such as resources and mining.

Borg – Continuous, Online Forced Consensus Voting – Ok, the Borg are a little different, they really do vote I’m sure. Its a plurality system, sort of.  Once more than half the collective decides, “one drone one vote”, then all other drones who disagreed are reprogrammed to agree with the decision. So after the fact it is always a completely unanimous democracy, ‘perfect’ as the Borg would say.

Humans/Federation – STV – The Federation of United Planets is primarily interested in fairness, equality and hearing all voices.  Despite accusations of being a ‘Homo Sapiens only club’ they would want broad representation of the many varied viewpoints on each planet and across the federation.  So clearly they would want a largely proportional system that also has local representation.  Each planet would need to send multiple representatives so that they are not viewed through a single, oversimplying stereotype.  Decisions in the government would be made using a parliamentary system where a majority rules but the majority would need to be formed through consensus and coalitions between individual representatives from different worlds or multi-world parties if these formed.

Now, what do you think?  I left out a lot of civilizations and I’m sure you disagree with something in my analysis, let me know.

A few must reads:

• Simple, to the point article by Gordon Gibson in the Vancouver Sun : Our second — and last, at least for a while — chance for change.
• Heart achingly emotional call for change from Chrystal : Why I Want BC-STV So Much That It Hurts
• A recent poll which shows why you need to be sure to vote and help out in the last week get the word out, we’re not there yet: http://thetyee.ca/Blogs/TheHook/BC-Politics/2009/05/02/STVPoll/

I get this a lot.  There are a lot of people who know about BC-STV, think its a great idea, an obviously great idea and assume its going to pass this time around.  That really gives me hope, I hope they’re right, I really do.  But some polls indicate that a lot of people, half the province or more, don’t even know about the referendum.  So I don’t know what to think except, lets not count our eggs until they’re hatched.  There is only a week and a bit to go, so lets just pretend for the next week that we’re not sure and make sure we do everything we can to make people aware of the importance of this referendum.

Last night there was a great info session with Shoni Field from the campaign and the head of Fair Vote USA, Krist Novoselic.  You might have heard of him from one of his former jobs as bassist for Nirvana….ya, no kidding.  Hey, I got my Nirvana albums signed   There was great attendance at the event, almost a full house at the theatre in Robson Square and there were young and old in attendance.  One of the things he said that was interesting was that they’ve been trying to get electoral reform in the US and had little traction and they are really looking forward to having a real state sized entity in North America switching from FPTP because it will help their case.  So British Columbians have a chance not just to start the discussion in Canada but in the US as well.  You can read more about what was said last night on twitter at #stvrocks.

So Krist thinks its obvious, the kids with their skateboards last night thought it was obvious, just as the older people who may never have listened to Nirvana but were there anyways.  While I was at the rally today I spoke to a woman in her car while she was waiting at the red light.  She didn’t know what it was, so I explained it to her:

Me (with placard): “We’re going to switch to a more proportional voting system.  So instead of just picking one candidate you get to rank all of them or as many as you like.  Then they’ll use your vote in order down the list.  If your first choice gets eliminated, they go to your second choice.  If your first choice wins and gets twice as many votes as they need, half your vote goes to your second choice.  And instead of just one person for your riding you’ll have 4 or 5 so there is more than one voice represented.  That’s it.”

Her (waiting at red light) : “Oh, that’s it?  That sounds good.  So its going to pass right?”

Me : “We hope so, but we need to get 60% to pass it, so its not easy.”

Her : (with furled brow) “Well, that not fair”

Then the light changed to green and she took a flyer.

So to everyone who says its complicated, how complicated can it be if you can explain it fairly while waiting for a red light?

And to everyone who thinks its obvious it will win, uh ya, it should be, but lets pretend its not for a bit longer, like, until May 12.

This article was written by Darren Peets, recently graduated PhD student in Physics from UBC and formerly of the UBC board of Governors. If you are on FaceBook you can read the original post here.

On May 12, 2009, BC residents have the extremely rare opportunity to change their voting system. Not having lived in BC the last 6 months, I’m not eligible to vote, which is rather annoying given the importance of this referendum. But I can encourage others to vote. I wholeheartedly support BC-STV, and would be voting Yes.

Under the current system, each constituency in BC elects one MLA, whomever gets the most votes in that riding. Under the proposed system (overwhelmingly recommended by a randomly-selected group of ordinary citizens), constituencies would be pooled in groups of 2-7, and voters would have a preferential ballot, where they rank the candidates, and their vote or fractions of it are shifted to lower choices as their first choices are elected or eliminated.

The STV (single transferable vote) part, where you rank the candidates, means that you can vote for whomever you want, and strategic voting becomes secondary. If you support the Marxist-Leninist Party and the Christian Heritage Party, you can put them at the top of your list. If they aren’t elected, your vote isn’t wasted, it passes to your third choice. Is one party scary? Put them last. Hate that party but like one of their candidates? Rank that candidate higher, and increase the odds that they’ll get elected at the expense of some of their compatriots. You can vote for your true first choice, knowing that your vote will pass to other candidates if your first choice doesn’t get in, and you don’t have to worry about trying to block evil parties or candidates from getting elected by guessing who their best competitor is. It’s unlikely one party will sweep a multi-member constituency, so you can have some say over who represents each party in your riding. Note, though, that you only have one vote, so who’s 12th and 13th on your list is not particularly important if your second-place candidate wins (if they win in a landslide, a good fraction of your vote may be transferred). While ranking candidates is marginally more mentally challenging than marking a single X, the system’s really not so complicated. The vote counting is similarly a bit more involved, but not difficult to explain. I’ll get to that a bit later.

The best part, for me, is the multi-member constituencies. The larger a riding, the closer the results will be to proportional (this isn’t proportional, but it’s more proportional than the current system. At the size proposed, a good third party will pick up some seats, and most ridings will have both a government and an opposition MLA, so almost everyone will feel represented. Even better, multi-member constituencies are good for candidates and bad for parties. It doesn’t suffice to be a candidate for the most popular party, you need to be the most popular candidate for that party. This should weaken the parties, and improve the chances of well-known, well-respected, popular, and responsive MLAs. I grew up in a riding where one party could have run a tree stump and it would still have been elected. The actual candidate appeared to me to have skills and language ability closely resembling those of a tree stump, had done nothing in the community, and was content to be a trained seal, heckling from the last row, and voting blindly with the party rather than the constituents. I see no downside to having stronger, more independent MLAs.

It has been pointed out that large ridings will be hard for politicians to cover and hard to campaign in, and that it may not be clear who represents you. To the first concerns, well, I see no reason to make it easy on politicians, and I’d point out that federal ridings are already several times larger than provincial. As for who represents you, several people do. Go to the one who’s most responsive or in the best position to help. If one ignores you, return the favour when marking your next ballot. A particularly helpful MLA will get ranked higher, and the MLAs will usually realize this.

The large ridings will also lead to large ballots. You get that in city council elections, and you deal with it. Here, the candidates will be grouped by party for your convenience.

If the government decides to shovel money off the back of a truck only in ridings that supported them, they’ll find that they elected MLAs in all or almost all ridings. The large ridings also make it much more difficult to adjust a riding’s boundaries to benefit one party or another.

It has been pointed out that the proposed system is more likely to create coalition and minority governments. This is likely true, but not a large effect (as I mentioned, it’s not truly proportional). In other countries, this sort of government is the norm, and the parties have to co-operate. They know that people don’t want elections, and they know they’ll be punished if they’re seen to have triggered a needless election. Our vicious, polarizing politics would need to change, and it’s likely that the most partisan, unco-operative politicians would get booted out. In coalition or minority governments, parties have to prioritize, compromise, and try to bring each other on board if they want something passed. For something to become law, at least two parties have to be willing to go along with it. The compromises may well be hammered out behind closed doors, but that’s where legislation is made now, and this at least gets some different voices behind those closed doors.

Before getting into the gory details, because a good number of my friends will want to read that, but most won’t, a couple of final-ish thoughts:

First, this is a choice between BC-STV and the current system. Other systems are not on the ballot. If you believe BC-STV is an improvement, vote for it. There is no perfect voting system, and what you like is not what other people will like. If everyone holds out for perfection, nothing can ever improve. There are parts I would have done differently, mainly in the vote-counting, but I see BC-STV as a
significant improvement over the current system, and would be whole-heartedly voting for it if it were still legal for me to vote. Better is not the enemy of best, and you shouldn’t vote as if it is.

Second, it’s actually been proven that there is no perfect voting system. If you write down everything you want in a voting system, you’ll find parts of your list conflict. You can’t have true proportionality and still have constituencies — some constituency would have to elect unpopular candidates. Proportionality in the current system, for instance, would require about 10 constituencies to have Green MLAs, despite those candidates only getting a small fraction of the vote and finishing second, third or fourth. You might like the stability of a majority government, but that’s at odds with local representation (your representative should vote with you, not with the party) and a truly proportional system would almost never produce a majority. BC-STV strikes a balance, and I think it’s a pretty good
balance, all things considered.

Third, the voting is not complicated. Anyone can count to three or ten and express a preference. The vote-counting is a bit more complicated, but it’s not that bad. I’d like everyone to understand it, but I recognize that many won’t care. Once the voting system is in place, people will generally just trust other people to ensure that it’s done correctly. The candidates and parties will watch the counting, because they have a vested interest in ensuring that it’s done right. Recounts would still be done by hand by judges, and I expect there’d be recounts in almost every riding. So faith in the system will not be misplaced. People like me who are interested will know how it’s done in detail, but we’re a minority. Much as I’d like them to, the average person doesn’t need to know the full details behind the vote-counting any more than they need to know how their car’s airbag decides to inflate, how the 911 operator knows where their (landline) phone is, or how TCP/IP works in their internet connection. Knowing that the ranking is important and your vote or parts of it will pass to lower-ranked candidates as needed would suffice.

Now for the gory details:

Every voter gets one ballot and one vote, but they can express a preference for how that vote is transferred when each surviving candidate at the top of their list is elected or dumped.

There’s a quota of votes that a candidate needs in order to be elected. If V valid ballots were cast and there are N seats to fill, the quota is V/(N+1) plus one. If you check this with N=1 (the current system), you’ll see they’d need half of the votes (50%) plus one. If there are 5 seats to fill, a candidate would need 1/5 plus one.

First, every first choice is counted. This is identical to the current system so far, but now the quota is applied. If the first-place candidate has met the quota, they’re elected. If not, the last-place candidate is eliminated. If a candidate is eliminated, all of their votes pass to their voters’ second choices. If a candidate is elected, their excess votes (over and above the quota) are distributed to second-place choices. So, if a candidate got 10% more votes than the quota, everyone who voted for that candidate has 91% (100/110) of their vote count for the elected candidate, while 9% (10/110) passes to their
second choice.

At this point, the process repeats: If anyone’s met the quota, they’re elected and their excess votes are distributed. If not, the bottom candidates are dropped and their votes distributed until someone has met the quota. Unsurprisingly, the process ends when the correct number of MLAs have been elected, and ballots are dropped once they run out of ranked candidates.

You can make up your own mind, but please vote!

Darren Peets is a postdoctoral fellow at Kyoto University and PhD Physics Alumni from UBC.