A commentary by a North Saanich resident.
Did your ballot count in the provincial election?
If your favoured candidate got the most votes, you and 1.09 million other British Columbia voters succeeded. Your ballot counted and will influence politicians and the direction of the province.
If you didn’t vote for the winner in your electoral district, you are among 1.05 million voters whose ballots were wasted.
The NDP had 943,915 votes, electing 47 MLAs. However, 393,000 NDP votes were cast in ridings that did not elect an NDP candidate. These NDP votes did not count.
Conservatives had 910,000 votes, but 392,000 were in electoral districts that did not have a successful Conservative candidate. These, too, were wasted ballots.
The Green Party elected MLAs in two ridings with 22,000 votes, but 271,000 votes cast by Greens elsewhere — 92% of all Green votes in this election — failed to elect Green candidates.
Overall, the votes of more than one million B.C. voters were in vain.
The failure of so many votes to count is due to First Past the Post (FPTP) voting. Only votes for the winner in a riding count. All other votes are discarded.
In a democracy, it should be difficult to defend a voting method that throws out half the votes.
Although B.C.’s election process has many requirements that ensure election integrity, discarding 50% of the ballots is reminiscent of Third World votes, where ballots are “lost” by dictators who put their thumb on the electoral scale.
In B.C., that does not occur, but all ballots should count if voters are to have confidence that this critical exercise will contribute to a fair and equitable result.
Referendums to replace FPTP have failed several times in British Columbia, but that must change. FPTP’s myopic focus on candidates could be enriched by putting greater focus on voters.
Proportional Representation can do that.
I recently visited New Zealand, which switched to Mixed Member Proportional (MMP) voting in 1996.
Each voter gets two votes, one vote for a candidate in the electoral district they live in, and the other for their favoured political party.
When the 2023 election was over and the winner in each of 72 electoral districts had been determined (via FPTP, no less), political parties divided the 51 remaining seats in the 123-seat Parliament based on the proportion of votes each party received.
These seats are filled from a ranked list of candidates each party prepared before the election. The most highly ranked candidates from each party get seats first and others follow until the number of seats for each party is proportionate to the number of votes the party drew with their second ballot.
Using the New Zealand Green Party’s performance in 2023 as an example, it won FPTP elections in only three electoral districts.
However, that 2% of the 123 seats in Parliament was far below the 11.6% of votes the party received overall. The party was entitled to add 12 “list” candidates, which gave it 11.6% of Parliamentary seats, 15 seats overall.
What would B.C.’s legislature look like if we used MMP in the 2024 election?
The NDP would have 43 seats.
Conservatives would have 42 seats.
Greens would have eight seats.
And every one of the 2.9 million votes cast would have counted.
What will it take for B.C. voters to abandon total reliance on FPTP, widely regarded as a simplistic voting method with sub-par results?
For once, we can say that politicians are not the problem. Several referendums on new voting methods, including MMP, have been put before B.C. voters, but not approved as a replacement for FPTP.
Politicians, parties, and any citizens who value their vote should come together and fix this. It should not be difficult to convince voters that voting is not a gamble, where your vote may count or not.
A system that values every vote is well worth the effort.
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