Hey folks,
Now that the election is settled I wanted to discuss one of the promises made by the Liberals that could prove interesting for Canadians come next election.
Electoral Reform
Quote:
We will make every vote count.
We are committed to ensuring that 2015 will be the last federal election conducted under the first-past-the-post voting system.
We will convene an all-party Parliamentary committee to review a wide variety of reforms, such as ranked ballots, proportional representation, mandatory voting, and online voting.
This committee will deliver its recommendations to Parliament. Within 18 months of forming government, we will introduce legislation to enact electoral reform.
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What do you think would be the best system to use to ensure the fairest representation of Canadians? Do you think that the Liberals will come through on this election promise?
Here is what the government would currently look like with straight proportional representation (the percentage of votes = percentage of seats):
134 LIB
108 CPC
67 NDP
16 BLQ
11 GRN
1 Independent
1 Libertarian
I think ranked ballots are an excellent idea and will help ensure a much better representation of what people actually want. For the uninitiated, essentially when you vote you rank the candidates (1, 2, 3, 4, etc) in your order of preference. From there, there is an instant runoff system where a candidate must have 50% or more of the vote to win, so if no candidate has 50% of the 1st choice votes, then you eliminate the candidate with least votes in the 2nd round of voting and check the 2nd choice for those who voted for them - if still no one has 50% then you go to the 3rd round and eliminate the new lowest candidate and count the 2nd choice votes for them, etc.