I’m going to make a really easy prediction: the referendum in Ontario is going to be nothing but another piece of paper that people have to fill out. It’s quite obvious that the electorate in Ontario considerably misunderstood or were completely uneducated about the purpose and benefits of the Mixed Member Proportional voting system (MMP).

Under the current First Past the Post (FPP) system the candidate with the most votes, in a district, wins the race and is elected as the Member of Provincial Parliament. The problem with this system is that it leaves a large proportion of voters considerably under-represented.

FPP (Current System):

One ballot. 107 seats, defined by electoral regions or districts individually decided by whoever has the most votes, even if it’s only 1 vote.

MMP:

Two ballots. The first ballot is for 90 seats, defined by electoral regions or districts individually decided by whoever has the most votes and an additional 39 seats decided by the proportion of votes for each political party on the 2nd ballot.

Projected Seat Distribution as at 10:47pm (source):

Download the Tables in Excel
Table Legend:

• Regional Seats: The distribution of seats by votes in a specific district
• % of Seats: The percentage of total seats won by a specific party
• % of Vote: The percentage of total votes obtained for each party across the province
• Difference: The absolute value of the difference between the % of Seats won subtracted from the % of the vote
• Proportional Seats: The number of seats obtained from the second ballot in the Mixed Member Proportional voting system.
• Distribution of Proportional Votes: The percentage of total second ballots in the Mixed Member Proportional voting system obtained for each party across the province.

Understanding Table 1:

Let’s take a detailed look at Table 1, above. Are you noticing something here? There is a large difference between the percentage of seats obtained by each party and the percentage of total votes that they received from their constituents. This is the primary problem with the current FPP system – a lack of representation. The greater the “Difference” the less representative the elected members of parliament are of the voting population.

The same is not true under the MMP system proposed by the Citizens’ Assembly on Electoral Reform.

Let’s apply this logic to tonight’s’ results and see how the representation would have changed under a MMP system.

Understanding Table 2:

Now let’s just assume that the people who voted for their FPP candidate also voted for the same candidate’s party with their secondary vote.

One thing you will immediately notice is that the “Difference” is considerably less than in the FPP system. This suggests that the members of parliament elected are more representative of the populations’ vote. The 39 seats remaining are distributed by proportion of popular vote for all parties that are above 3% of the popular vote.

Understanding Table 3:

Just to give you an idea of how much proportional voting could change the political landscape, let’s look at Table 3. The only change here is that half of the people who voted Liberal, decided to vote for the conservatives with their proportional ballot.

Notice that the “Difference” goes down considerably.

The Caveats of MPP

There are pitfalls to all systems but I’ll let you decide if they outweigh the lack of representation:

• The list of candidates that benefit from the proportional vote are not elected by the people directly, they are appointed by the party
• It is likely to lead to Minority Governments (it’s up to you to decide if that’s a bad thing)
• It could allow special interest parties to infiltrate politics
• Lack of voter understanding

Why the Electorate Fails to Understand MMP:

Isn’t the purpose of a democratic state to be representative of the people who live there?

Would you agree that after reading this description that the lower the “Difference” the more your vote counts, especially in a situation where you are voting for a party that is the minority in your region?

If you knew that there was a system of voting that would make it such that your vote, and the vote of other constituents who voted for parties that were not of the elected Member of Parliament counted for something, wouldn’t you want to use it?

In any case, I’m considerably disappointed that the current Liberal government put such little care into promoting education of the MMP referendum. They do seem to have the most seats to lose, interestingly.

Awesome experience. Everything you would expect to see at a circus and a little more. The interludes were exceptionally comical. One scared patron had her chair lifted from the ground to her surprise. Many others had popcorn thrown at them and a few even more unsuspecting ones were even urinated on by a friendly police dog… awkward.

I’m not going to ruin the show for others by describing all of the acts I’ll just say that the contortionist put break dancers to shame with their skills.

My personal favourite was the two men in the rotating wheels, fairly difficult to explain but nevertheless exciting, dangerous and crowd pleasing.

All in all the acrobatics, in combination with the costumes and well thought out comedy made Kooza an incredibly worthwhile experience.

Break dancers… beware of contortionists who start making appearances on the urban dance scene.