Initial thoughts, BC Referendum 2005
Posted in Politics on May 18th, 2005 by Sacha PeterHere are the interim results for the BC Referendum 2005. As of this writing, 59 out of 79 electoral districts have reported interim results.
It looks like that BC-STV will have FAILED with a 57% YES, 43% NO vote, with about 75 districts having voted 50% or more for it. The 57/43 split is probably the only thing that I called correctly this election.
I have to wait for all the electoral districts to report before coming to more conclusions. Obviously I am quite saddened by this result, as it means that the various political groups are going to use this result as an excuse to use mixed-member proportional representation, which is a horrible form of proportional representation. No politician or political party would ever implement BC-STV themselves, it just gives up too much of their power.
Carole James, Adriane Carr both believe in this form of proportional representation. The reason is because it allows the political parties to create lists, whereby the people on the top of the list get elected first to the Legislature. This gives political party executives incredible power to decide who they want to end up in the Legislature, and it gives the people the smallest amount of choice, as they don’t even know which person on the party list their vote will count for on the party list.
Campbell is publicly refusing to say how he voted for BC-STV, but it’s increasingly clear that he’s keeping his mouth quiet since he voted YES for it, but his party insiders all voted NO. On the issue of BC-STV, Campbell seemingly has more principles than the other party leaders it seems.
Agreed about Campbell and principles (on this issue anyway).
Like you I think STV is the best system, but we probably disagree in that I think MMP makes a close second. Certainly the main thing to fight for in the design of MMP will be to minimize how much control parties have over who gets elected.
If you had to adopt MMP, how would you try and mitigate the party-control aspect of it? B.C. would never tolerate a closed list (I hope) so I think voters would at least be allowed to choose a name they like from the party list. I would also like to see a randomized list for voters to choose from, so people at the top of the list aren’t automatically elected. Parties could still tell their supporters who they want them to vote for, but it would be up to voters whether they wanted to listen or not.
As for your predictions, they weren’t great, but they were better than mine.