Take One Vote and Pass It On

By Hamutal Dotan

Photo by Hamutal Dotan/Torontoist.

“My friends, my fellow mushrooms….For all of our lives they’ve been keeping us in the dark! They’ve been feeding us bullshit!” A political career was born earlier this week, and it belongs to one Marvin Mushroom. Marvin proved himself a fearsome candidate: quick-witted, righteously indignant, born speech-maker. Marvin was campaigning, of course, for mushrooms to feature prominently on the assembled voters’ pizza, and he drew a hearty round of applause after making his case.
If you are hopelessly confused right now you must not have been at Tranzac Monday night, when Fair Vote Canada hosted a discussion of the Single Transferable Vote (STV), a system of preferential voting which election reform advocates are hoping to pass in BC later this spring. STV is one of a number of systems geared towards providing proportional representation—to ensuring that the allocation of seats in a political assembly (provincial parliament, in this case) closely matches the distribution of the popular vote. Contrast this with the current first past the post system, in which a party can secure a majority of seats in parliament with a minority of the popular vote. (Political keeners will recall that Ontario faced its own debate on proportional representation recently, though “debate” is perhaps a strong word given how little attention was paid to the subject.)
And how, you may be wondering, did a name-tag-wearing, vote-pursuing mushroom enter the scene? Marvin and his cohort (including Fred Feta and Peter Pineapple) were part of a demonstration, a real-time election simulation designed to make the nuances of each voting system vivid. Torontoist, politically geeky as always, decided to brush up on its social studies and took part in this little bit of educational theatre.

Stuart Parker discussing STV. Photo by Hamutal Dotan/Torontoist.

Dave Meslin, civic activist extraordinaire, hosted the event, and kicked things off with a tongue-in-cheek summary of the competing electoral systems. First past the post, he said, created the same sort of problem as a night of random sex: you go to bed knowing how you voted, confident in the adequacy of your political representation, but wake up with a government that you don’t even recognize in the morning. The evening’s featured speaker, Stuart Parker, then launched into an analysis of the problem in earnest, laying out the case for proportional representation in general and STV in particular. His enthusiasm was palpable, and the audience was clearly already on board, well-aware of the sense of disenfranchisement first past the post systems can produce. At intervals throughout the evening various rounds of voting took place, as first past the post and STV elections (for the aforementioned pizza toppings) were held to illustrate the different results (that is, the different kinds of pizza) each would produce. (Marvin Mushroom, you will be pleased to know, fared well in both.)
According to STV, electoral districts each have multiple representatives, and citizens cast their votes for a ranked list of their preferred candidates. Once a candidate has received enough votes to be elected, any surplus votes they may have received are redistributed according to the subsequent preferences of the people that voted for them. For instance: if I ranked Marvin Mushroom number one on my ballot, but he has more than enough votes to secure a seat, my second choice candidate, Fred Feta, will be pick up some ground in the competition for the remaining seat(s) in my district.
So why was a crowd of Torontonians assembled to discuss a referendum being held in BC? Fair Vote Canada is pulling out all the stops on this one, trying to encourage activists to travel west and advocate for STV in the upcoming weeks. Proportional representation proposals have been floated, and defeated, in several provinces over the last few years, and election reformers are starting to feel like the May 12 referendum may be their last stand. Said Parker: “The reality is that our movement may not be able to take another defeat…the entire national movement for voting reform is of the opinion that we need this win.”