B.C. Referendum — web sites dealing with the referendum
I am disappointed with the web sites of the official campaigns on both sides of the referendum:

http://stv.ca/ (supporting a switch to the STV voting system)
http://nostv.ca/ (supporting retention of the current first-past-the-post voting system)

Both the proponent campaign and the opponent campaign are funded with public money, each side having received $500,000 from the government.

The stv.ca site is very slick, but I found it difficult to navigate and locate solid information. As a friend of mine said: “Wow, that stv.ca site is political malpractice. There should be a clear, one-paragraph description of what the hell they're talking about, right up top. (Instead, there's a baffling TV spot that explains nothing.)”

The nostv.ca site is less slick, and easier to navigate, but I find many of the arguments there to be slightly misleading. For example, it says: “In the proposed seven-MLA Capital Region, a candidate would be declared elected with just 12.5% of the vote, while in the Northeast, a two-MLA region, a candidate would be elected with 33.3% of the vote. That would give BC what amounts to two different voting systems, and that is not equal effective representation.” That is misleading because it doesn’t mention that the riding with 7 MLAs has a much larger population than the riding with 2 MLAs. It makes total sense that a candidate might get elected by obtaining either a bigger percentage of a smaller number of votes or a smaller percentage of a bigger number of votes. There’s nothing unfair or unreasonable about that.

The web site of the Referendum Information Office, BCreferendum2009.ca, is quite good. It is a neutral service run by B.C.’s Ministry of Attorney General, and it’s easy to find good, clear information there via the navigation bar.

If you want a formal description covering all the details of the proposed BC-STV system, you have to go to the site of the Citizens’ Assembly on Electoral Reform. The Citizens’ Assembly was an interesting experiment sponsored by the government; briefly, two citizens were selected from each riding by random draw from the voters’ list. The assembly convened over a period of months, heard from experts and from the general public, and deliberated on whether it would recommend a change to the electoral system and if so, what system should be recommended.

The formal description of the BC-STV system is in the Citizens’ Assembly’s technical report, beginning at page 31 of the PDF (which is page 17 of the Report).

If you want to watch a video clip explaining STV, you could go to the stv.ca site, but I found their videos a bit tedious. There’s a better one at a web site of the New Zealand government: www.stv.govt.nz/STV/how.htm. It should be noted that the version of STV used in New Zealand (for some local elections) is a little different from BC-STV. The New Zealand version is more complicated, but they are still able to explain it clearly.

I also found a good brochure from New Zealand concisely setting out the pros and cons of both STV and FPTP.

The Library of Parliament research service has put out what looks like a good report: Canada’s Electoral Process: Frequently Asked Questions.

As for blogs covering the B.C. referendum, Bill Tieleman’s blog is covering the most cogent arguments to vote against adopting STV, such as in this post. For a pro-STV viewpoint, I would suggest visiting ereform.blogspot.com. Another pro-STV blog is FairVoteUBC.wordpress.com, but I don’t find the content there particularly informative.

In my next blog entry, I am going to comment on some recent elections where STV was used as the voting system, from Northern Ireland and Scotland.