Friday, September 2, 2016

Electoral Reform; a proposal that could win support

I've given things some serious thought and I think I have a system that, possibly, could win the support of all 5 parties, as well as win in a nation wide referendum. Urban-PR. I plan to explain exactly why this is in a post over the weekend, however, I wanted to address a few basics. First, I'll introduce this with some maps. The darker areas would be proportional, while the rural areas would retain single-member districts.







(as well as the Atlantic with 32 Liberal seats)



I'll address one problem right now, and that is the idea that doing this would lead to endless conservative governments. Lets take a look at Saskatchewan in 2003. In the real election, the NDP won 30 seats, compared to 28 for the Saskatchewan Party. The NDP won on 44.63% of the vote, compared to only 39.35% for the Saskatchewan Party. The Liberals managed 14.18%, but at the time were seen as much closer to the NDP than the Saskatchewan Party.

Putting a system like this in place for Regina and Saskatoon, and using D'Hondt for the math, you'd end up with the following changes:

Rural Areas (FPTP)
25 - SKP - 48.6%
10 - NDP - 40.3%
00 - LIB - 11.2%

Regina (PR)
7 - NDP - 57.8% (11 FPTP)
3 - SKP - 26.1% (00 FPTP)
1 - LIB - 16.1% (00 FPTP)

Saskatoon (PR)
6 - NDP - 48.3% (9 FPTP)
4 - SKP - 29.8% (3 FPTP)
2 - LIB - 16.1% (0 FPTP)

Result:
32 - SKP - 39.4%
23 - NDP - 44.6%
03 - LIB - 14.2%

As you can see, this clearly boosts the conservative party in this race... however, this particular election was chosen for this reason. This is actually not as common as you may think, the maps above show that. Add to that the fact that rural ridings would likely not remain FPTP, and would likely become some form of alternative vote, and you can start to see the change. There are 4 ridings that I could see changing hands if Liberals heavily preferenced the NDP, the result would be as follows:

Result:
28 - SKP - 39.4%
27 - NDP - 44.6%
03 - LIB - 14.2%

While the Saskatchewan Party is still 'over-represented', they fail to obtain a majority, and as such, the Liberals would hold the balance of power.

No comments:

Post a Comment