Should we keep our current electoral system?
 

Ontario will soon hold a referendum on whether we should keep our current First Past the Post electoral system or adopt a more proportional one.

I'm all for proportional representation. While I don't want to lose local representation altogether, FPtP introduces too much aliasing to give us representational government. Many countries already enjoy a compromise between the two and with great success. I think it's about time we should do the same.

What do you all think?


This thread is for seretogis. Lets see a flame war start here!

Feel free to post your views, but we have very deeply rooted feelings here about a "flame war". Keep it civil.

The electorial system is a compromise by the founding fathers
to make sure that the less populous states get their share of funding, representation and attention by presidents.

Otherwise, only states like CA, NY, TX, FL, IL would get the attention,
and out of 50 states...that's not good.

We need to keep it to keep a balance,
one, once in a blue moon fluke like what happened last election,
wouldn't compare to the unbalanced elections that would exist after the ending of the electorial process.

How would you like the political parties spending all their time and money in just LA & NYC?
Because that's what would happen with a pure population vote.

And believe it or not, then the GOP would have the disadvantage in the presidential elections.

I dont know about proportional representation. Russia kinda has this implemented for the duma. half the representatives are elected, and the other half is allotted to parties based on their votes.

it just seems weird to me that a rep that is elected directly and one that is chosen by the party have the same powers.

Not sure about what you detail in the post and Canada, but as for the electoral college in the US, I think the problems with vote counting and procedures seem to point to it still being a good idea. In this way if there is a significant problem with the election in one state, the electors can take the problems into consideration when they vote and not hold up the entire country's process while courts figure it all out. An equally valid argument could be made for it not being representative though, so maybe there needs to be some regulation on how the electors "decide" to vote.

The problem with proportioanl systems is it gives a lot more power to the fringe groups.

If you NEED the votes of some nutty party that 8% of the people voted for, you end up giving them far more then their wacky 8% is due.

Ah, you misunderstand me. Please refer to seretogis' last post in the thread "Welcome to Canada, is that butterknife registered?" to understand my meaning...

First of all, it's sort of the point of proportional representation to give more power to the "fringe" groups. Unless you mean that the fringe groups are, literally, given more power than the majority groups, which is patently false.

Secondly, if 8% voted for that "nutty" party, perhaps that party isn't so whacky? That's almost one tenth the population. Should we simply ignore them?
Now, I understand that there's an overhead for giving each party the floor so I'm not advocating giving every small percentage representation. To that end, I'm not advocating a purely proportional electoral system, I'm just objecting to a purely First Past the Post system. This is what we currently use in Ontario and, thanks to it, the NDP party saw their popularity go up to 14% but saw their seats go down to 7 out of 103.

To give you an idea of how much aliasing FPtP produces, here are some of this year's election stats:

party - popularity - seats

pre:
PC - 45% - 59
Liberal - 40% - 35
NDP - 12% - 9

post:
Liberal - 46% - 72
PC - 35% - 24
NDP - 14% - 7

So, the Liberals gained a modest 6% in popularity but more than doubled their seats! The PC lost 10% popularity but lost more than half their seats. Furthermore, the NDP lost official party status due to this anomalous phenomenon, made possible only by First Past the Post...

I don't know enough about the American electoral system to say whether or not they should go for propotional representation but I do know that in Ontario and the rest of Canada it would a welcome change.

The Green Party on Ontario received 8% of the vote... a huge incease over their previous (I believe) 2%. They didn't win any seats. Should the 8% of the populace that vote Green not have any say?

I think it is definately time for a change. A diversity of voices are required rather than the staid system we currently have.

The all-or-nothing situation in the US when it comes to electoral votes is a bit ridiculous. It seems to remove the possibility of any other party gaining any sort of political ground against the Republicans and Democrats. If other parties were to be able to get a proportionate amount of electoral votes, I'm willing to bet that they would become more popular as alternatives to the Republicrats.

I love the propotional election system. I've seen the system in Canada and Costa Rica I beieve.

A winner take all system seems something more akin to monopoly than democracy.

(Hmm I jus made that up.)

I love to see it here in the States. I think Louisiana has it in some local elections. I've heard movements for it in California too.