This is my anti pro-rep page with a few of my thoughts. This is mostly just a place with relevant links that I can point people to instead of vainly waving my hands around in argument.

What's a pro-rep electoral system? It's an attempt to correct the perceived unfairness of the first past the post electoral system. In first past the post, the candidate that receives more votes than any of the other candidates in that district wins the seat, even if say 80% of the votes went to other candidates. Things get really testy if a political party gets into power with a far greater percentage of seats than their percentage of the raw popular vote, like the BC Liberal Party did in the 2001 provincial election. They won 58% of the raw popular vote across the province, but because of how their votes were distributed, that translated into 97% of the seats in the legislature. Pro-rep corrects this perceived unfairness in various ways that, in addition to granting seats according to the outcome in each district, grants additional seats to parties that won a substantially greater percentage of the popular vote than they did districts.

Pro-rep is a straw-man issue, and deceivingly named. There's nothing wrong with the first past the post system. First past the post is how tournaments like the Stanley Cup and World Series work after all. If the losing team were to cry how unfair it is that they scored so many points and won so many games during the season, yet had nothing to show for it, you'd call them sore losers.

Pro-rep dilutes your democratic power by reducing the chance that your single vote could swing the outcome of your riding, and hence the outcome of an election. This isn't a political issue, it's a resolved mathematical problem. Certainly, there are lots of issues that need fixing:

• Voter apathy, due to:
  • elected representatives being too afraid of their own parties to speak their minds and vote freely on issues in government
  • the mainstream media, biased by advertisers to distract and entertain instead of inform and involve
  • information overload
  • poor education about government
  • ultimately, voters themselves
• The underrepresentation of women and visible minorities in government, due to party politics and power plays.
• The tendency for elected representatives to toe their party line, thanks to a lack of legislation that protects representatives from being kicked out of their party (an important support structure for any representative) when their vote (which reflects the representative's commitment to his or her constituents and conscience) clashes with their party's vote.
• A lack of seriously restrictive caps on campaign spending limits. Power and money begets more power and money, at the expense of democracy.

Why do I care about all of this? Years ago I read an article in Discover Magazine (yes, it's owned by Disney) about the mathematics of voting. It came to the initially unintuitive conclusion that first past the post is the most democratic electoral system out there, as measured by the power of a single vote to swing the outcome of an election. The raw popular vote on the other hand is a very unresponsive way to measure the dynamics of a society's wishes. One reason for this is that your vote is among a pool of millions of others, instead of only thousands as in a district, making it much less likely that your single vote could be the deciding one.

That article stuck with me, and over the last few years the issue of pro-rep has come up here in BC, and across Canada. I've paid attention to the debates over the years, and I have yet to hear anyone in the media, in power, or in grassroots consider what a change in voting system could do to an individual's voting power.

For a much more eloquent and convincing explanation, I urge you to read the original November 1996 article by Will Hively in Discover Magazine (© The Walt Disney Company) before Walt's lawyers come 'n get me:

Math Against Tyranny

There's also a similar, but shorter article from 2004-09-15 in Business Week.

I've exchanged a couple of emails with Natapoff, including the relevance of his arguments to the Canadian electoral system. I've included them here:

In frustation, on 2006-03-27 I made a couple of posts to the Globe and Mail's comments section on the story that a Citizen's Assembly on electoral reform is being set up to consider alternatives to FPTP in Ontario.

Here's the abstract for the paper mentioned in the article: A Mathematical One-Man One-Vote Rationale for Madisonian Presidential Voting Based on Maximum Individual Voting Power (1996) Natapoff A. Public Choice 88(3-4):259-73.

The well-meaning but misguided BC Citizen's Assembly on Electoral Reform has decided on a referendum question for the May 17, 2005 provincial election that proposes the "single transferable vote" system. Their report states:

"Because this is a proportional system, the number of seats a party wins matches their share of the popular vote." (my italics)

Here's an old newsletter put out by the equally well-meaning and misguided Free Your Vote, a BC pro-rep group. It had details of how pro-rep might have worked in BC.

Then there's the Canada-wide pro-rep group called Fair Vote Canada. Their discussion list is interesting.

KnowSTV and No2STV are two sites that argue against the proposed STV system for BC.

aceproject.org is an excellent neutral site that, among other things, has a section detailing a wide variety of electoral systems with case studies.