About Fair Voting

Representative democracy is a simple concept. Citizens elect their representatives. The majority win the right to make decisions.

But do Canadians actually have representative democracy? In the October 2008 federal election:

• 940,000 voters supporting the Green Party sent no one to Parliament, setting a new record for the most votes cast for any party that gained no parliamentary representation. By comparison, 813,000 Conservative voters in Alberta alone were able to elect 27 MPs.
• In the prairie provinces, Conservatives received roughly twice the vote of the Liberals and NDP, but took seven times as many seats.
• Similar to the last election, a quarter-million Conservative voters in Toronto elected no one and neither did Conservative voters in Montreal.
• New Democrats: The NDP attracted 1.1 million more votes than the Bloc, but the voting system gave the Bloc 49 seats, the NDP 37.

What about majority rule? Canadians are usually ruled by majority governments that the majority voted against. In some provincial elections, parties coming in second in the popular vote have won majority control of the legislature. In other cases, the opposition is sometimes reduced to a seat or two (and in one case, none at all) despite representing forty percent of the electorate.

For a short summary of the problems with Canada's first-past-the-post voting system, see This is Democracy?. For an introduction to the alternatives, see Voting Systems - We Have Choices!. (Note: first published in 2005, these papers do not include data from the most recent elections, but do provide a solid introduction to the issues.)

For those seeking more detailed information on voting systems, we recommend the following.

The Mt. Holyoke College online proportional representation library provides an intermediate level overview of voting systems, with more detail, sample ballots, and pros and cons for each system.

The websites for the British Columbia Citizens' Assembly on Electoral reform and the Ontario Citizens' Assembly on Electoral Reform have excellent introductory materials.

International sources of information include the Ace Project and the Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance (IDEA) websites. Electoral System Design: The New International IDEA Handbook can be downloaded or purchased. Another section of the IDEA web site provides 14 individual country case studies, including mixed member proportional systems in Germany and New Zealand, a national PR list system in South Africa, a regional list system in Finland and STV in Ireland.