MMP - why you actually should care

“In fact, let us not mince words… The Management is TERRIBLE!

We’ve had a string of embezzlers, frauds, Liars, and lunatics making a string of catastrophic decisions.

This is plain fact.

But who elected them?

It was YOU! You who appointed these people! You gave them the power to make your decisions for you!”

— V for Vendetta

The short version of this rambling post is this:

You really want to vote YES for Mixed Member Proportional voting in the coming Ontario provincial election. The reason you want to do this is that it makes government more closely represent the actual voter preferences.

The long version is this:

If you’ve ever wondered any of the following things:

1) Why do we basically have a 2 party system?
2) Should I vote for the party I really want, or the party that is most likely to form opposition to the party I really hate?
3) I like my local candidate, but I really hate the political party he belongs to.

Then you want MMP to come into action.

A short tutorial:

Our current electoral system in Canada is called a single member district plurality voting system (SMDP). For each riding; technically an electoral district area (EDA) for the federal level or consituency area (CA) at the provincial level; there’s is only one winner.

That’s the part that every one basically knows and understands very well.

Under MMP, you vote for your candidate, then you vote again for the party you want. If a party doesn’t win the number of ridings that is equal to the percentage of it’s popular vote, then the seats for that riding are “topped up”.

The seats would be allocated based on a pre-submitted ordered list of candidates to fill those positions.

So the question is why the hell does any of this have anything to do with a 2 party system?

I’m sure we’ve all had this problem. I know I did in the 2006 federal election. I voted for the Liberals even though I wanted to vote for the Green Party of Canada, but my vote would probably be wasted. This applies to all minority parties so the effect is that the popular vote gets skewed towards the parties that will become the governing party and the official opposition.

The end effect of all this is that you get Duverger’s Law. You tend towards a government with two major parties. Yes - I know the NDP exists, but please - there’s a big frigging drop off in seats after #2 in parliament, and more importantly - there are no parties after #3 at all.

MMP would stop that all. The incentive to vote ‘tactically’ would go away as any party with greater than 3% of the popular vote would get a seat. If you like your candidate, but hate the party, you can vote that way. Your party preference would be considered during this ‘top-up’.

Please. Spend 15 minutes to read up on it . Look at the other governments that use MMP, and at least make an informed decision on October 10th.
Voting is literally the least you can do to participate in a democracy. Do something that makes the system just a little bit better.

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