Fairvote Canada

Only 48.2% of New Brunswick voters supported the New Brunswick Liberals, yet the voting system has handed Susan Holt’s Liberals 63.3% of the seats and 100% of the power.

The election results were a misrepresentation of what voters said with their ballots:

• The Liberals got 63.3% of the seats with 48.2% of the vote.
• The Progressive Conservatives got 32.7% of the seats with 35.0% of the vote.
• The Greens got only 4.1% of the seats with 13.8% of the votes, electing only 2 MLAs to represent their 51,523 voters.
• About 44.9% of voters – 168,429 – cast wasted votes that elected no-one.

With proportional representation, where the seats in the New Brunswick legislature matched the popular vote, no single party would have had all the power and parties would have had to work together in the legislature.

First-past-the-post makes New Brunswick appear more divided along linguistic lines than it actually is. The 16 PC seats are all in the English-speaking ridings, so the Liberal victory is in the francophone ridings plus six in Saint John and three in Fredericton. With proportional representation, all three parties will have elected MLAs in all areas of the province.

“Once again, our voting system has distorted the will of the people,” said Vivian Unger, from Fair Vote New Brunswick. This time, it gave the Liberals a majority with 48.2% of the vote. I congratulate the Liberals on their win, but I’d also like to remind them of that time in 2018 that they got the most votes but lost the election. This time, they were running against a very unpopular Premier, and that helped them out. That’s not something they can count on in the future. I hope this win will not prevent them from holding that citizens’ assembly on electoral reform, ASAP. Their members voted for it.”

The New Brunswick Greens put proportional representation in their election platform. For the sake of all New Brunswick voters, it’s time for the New Brunswick Liberals to put proportional representation on their agenda.

While British Columbians wait with baited breath for the final results from BC’s provincial election, one thing is clear: First-past-the-post has robbed voters of choice, deeply polarized communities, and when it comes to the biggest issues facing British Columbia, resolved absolutely nothing.

BC Conservative leader John Rustad’s election night speech captured the sorry state of affairs:

“If we are in that situation of the NDP forming a minority government, we will look at every single opportunity from day one to bring them down …and get back to the polls.”

A leader whose party received 44% of the popular vote vowing to do everything in his power to ensure the legislature doesn’t work for the majority, gunning for the next chance to seize all the power with less than half of the vote, is a brutal, yet predictable outcome of first-past-the-post.

If the supposed advantages of our winner-take-all system are its ability to cater to the centrist voter, ensure “strong, stable majority governments”, prevent “backroom deals”, deliver fast results on election night, and keep out extremists, it has failed utterly on all counts―all at once.

BC’s election has exposed these claims for what they are: at best, misleading talking points from those who haven’t reviewed the evidence, and at worst, deliberately dishonest assertions from shallow politicians who consistently put their own ambitions of power ahead of the public interest when it comes to electoral reform...

BC Green Party:

In their statement, the Greens make two key promises of special interest to electoral reformers:

introduce legislation to implement a Proportional Representation system for the 2028 election

establish a biennial Citizens’ Assembly, with the first topic to be discussed [being] the type of voting system to adopt for the 2028 election In the democracy section of their platform, the Greens reiterate these promises to implement proportional voting in 2028 and to establish a biennial Citizens' Assembly. In addition, they propose to lower the voting age to 16, reform parliamentary practices to promote transparency and encourage collaboration between parties, and change executive practices to proactively release information and support meaningful consultation.

BC NDP:

Under the Effective Government section of their platform, makes no mention of voting or campaign financing issues.

Conservative Party of BC:

We could find no reference to voting or campaign financing issues on the CPBC platform.

BC United:

Although BC United has withdrawn from this election, several former candidates are running as independents. The BC United "Where We Stand" page does not list any democratic-reform-related issues.

More broadly, CBC has published a brief overview of the parties' positions on a number of issues, though not on anything related to democratic reform.

In summary, of the parties and candidates running in this year's election, only the BC Greens have shown any recognition of the need for democratic reform. We recommend that voters take this into consideration in determining who to vote for.

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Article

Currently, we vote for one representative per riding. The issue with that is that (hypothetically) one riding could have a million people and another could have 100 people. But both of them would have the same amount of power in Parliament because 1 riding = 1 mp.

How would that work in a proportional election system? Is there one candidate per X number of citizens in an area? Wouldn't cities be over represented? Wouldn't there be one candidate to cover very large sparsely inhabited areas that might not have the same needs from one spot to another?

I'm really curious how this would be implemented.

There's many posts here with the purpose of convincing people to support electoral reform. Not so much that's actually actionable. What do we do if we want to change things? For a start, does anyone have information on who's responsible for the election system at each level of government in each of the major cities?