Yesterday, in British Columbia, attorney general Dave Eby announced the details of plans for a provincial referendum on proportional representation in November. Current polling suggests this referendum has a good chance of passing. That would make a great example for US reformers looking for a way to end gerrymandering.
Here’s some back-story on the situation in British Columbia:
- There were a pair of crazy BC elections in the late 90s/early 2000s. First the NDP won a false majority, then NDP seat numbers crashed precipitously in the following election even though their vote numbers only went down a little.
- They had the first modern Citizens' Assembly in 2004 to look into voting reform. The CA proposed "BC-STV" after almost a year of work, with strong supermajority.
- There was a referendum in 2005. BC-STV gets 58% of the vote, short of 60% threshold.
- Another referendum in 2009. This time, districts had been drawn; rural voters don't like the big districts, and parties were not in favor because the memory of the crazy elections is fading. Referendum failed with 39%.
- On a Canada-wide level, current prime minister Justin Trudeau campaigned and won with a no-nonsense pledge of voting reform, but then once he took office and it was no longer advantageous to his party, reneged by sending the issue to a study commission and then complaining that their recommendations were not clear enough.
- In the May 2017 BC provincial electiions, votes were around 41%, 40%, 17% for Liberals, NDP, Greens; this translated to 43, 41, 3 seats.
- After a few months of negotiations, NDP-Green coalition formed and began to govern BC. PR was a key point of cooperation agreement.
- In October 2017, they decided to have a public consultation run by the attorney general (Dave Eby, an NDP party member) until the end of February, then decide what to vote on, then vote on it before the end of November.
- Yesterday (May 30), Eby came out with his recommended referendum plan. There will be a two-question referendum:
- Do you want proportional representation, or first past the post? (Note: FPTP is a name for the current vote-for-one plurality voting method.)
- If the province adopts proportional representation, which of the following methods is best (rank your preferences):
- Dual member proportional (DMP). In this method, each riding (Canadian for “district”) has two seats, and each major party has two candidates per riding. The first goes to the local plurality winner; the other seats are allocated to parties based on overall vote proportions, and within parties based on which ridings they did best in.
- Mixed member proportional (MMP). In this method, 60% of seats would be allocated based on winners in ridings (slightly larger than currently), and 40% would be allocated to parties to ensure proportionality with overall vote. Parties under 5% wouldn’t get top-up seats.
- Flexible district PR (FDPR). In this method, denser urban areas use single transferable voting (aka multi-member ranked choice voting), while sparser rural areas use MMP.
A key thing to note here is that British Columbia showed it’s willing to innovate. Proportional representation is an old idea, but both DMP and FDPR are newly-designed twists on this idea, tailored specifically to BC’s needs. In particular, DMP uses the idea of “biproportionality”, a way to balance the goals of simple ballots, local representation, and proportional outcomes. I believe that biproportional methods (such as PLACE voting) may be the most viable for reform in the US, because they could end the problem of gerrymandering without requiring redistricting or unnecessarily disrupting existing representative-district relationships. So it’s encouraging to see biproportional methods (up to now, only used in Swiss municipal elections) getting serious attention.