BC Election Single Transferable Vote Referendum: What is BC-STV?

by Tina Kells | May 3, 2009 at 03:34 pm

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In the 2009 BC Election British Columbians won’t just be choosing a new government, they will also be deciding on whether or not to adopt a Single Transferable Vote (STV) electoral system. The May 12, 2009 ballot will include a referendum question asking British Columbians if they want to trade in the current “first past the post” voting system for the Single Transferable Vote method.

Two-thirds of British Columbian voters must elect to adopt the BC-STV proposal in order for it to become law and the government is the bound by the decision. The last time the STV was on the ballot it won a majority of the support, 58% of voters chose yes, but it was not enough. Supporters hope that this time will be different.

The Yes on BC-STV campaign thinks that the last referendum was lost because most voters did not fully understand what a Single Transferable Vote means and are devoted to ensuring that this time around British Columbians are clear on the benefits. BC-STV has produced an excellent cartoon that outlines what an STV would mean for BC voters.

View the BC-STV Single Transferable Vote Cartoon

What exactly is a Single Transferable Vote?

The Citizens’ Assembly of British Columbi a spent months studying alternative electoral systems before deciding that a Single Transferable Vote would be the best reform alternative for BC. Called a “a system that is fair, easy to use and gives more power to voters” the BC-STV proposal has been custom made for British Columbia.

The BC-STV is based on a Proportional Representation by the Single Transferable Vote system (PR-STV) and addresses the three things that many people in British Columbia think are ignored under the current system; proportionality, local representation and voter choice. An STV system is used at various levels of government in several other countries including Ireland, Scotland, New Zealand, Australia and even the United States.

On the surface the Single Transferable Vote system looks complicated. It involves using a minimum quota of votes and a mathematical equation to declare a winner. The complicated nature of the system has been proven to be the single biggest barrier to building support for the BC-STV.

The Single Transferable Vote defined:

A frequent concern with STV among electorates considering its adoption is its relative complexity compared with plurality voting methods.

STV differs from all other proportional-representation systems in actual use in that candidates of one party can be elected on transfers from voters for other parties. Hence, the use of STV may reduce the role of political parties in the electoral process and corresponding partisanship in the resulting government.

An STV election proceeds according to the following steps:
1.   Any candidate who has reached or exceeded the required quota is declared elected.
2.   If not enough candidates have been elected, the count continues.
3.   If a candidate has more votes than the quota, then their surplus is transferred to other candidates according to the next preference on each voter's ballot.
4.   If no one meets the quota, the candidate with the fewest votes is eliminated and their votes are transferred.
This process repeats from step 1 until the required number of candidates have been elected.

How the custom made BC-STV proposal will work:

BC-STV retains some important features of our current system:

The number of MLAs is unchanged province-wide and for each region. All are elected by local ridings.

The ratio of voters to MLA is the same.

However, BC-STV differs from our current, first-past-the-post system in several crucial ways:

Fewer ridings will each elect several MLAs – between two and seven, depending on riding population.

The voter ranks candidates on the ballot paper in the order of the voter’s preference.

BC-STV is designed to make every vote count and to reflect voters’ support for candidates and parties as closely as possible. It achieves this by ensuring that the share of votes for candidates and parties is reflected in the share of seats won in the Legislature. And it allows voters’ second and third (and subsequent) preferences to come into play if their first choice isn’t elected.

Read all the details in plain and easy to understand language from the Citizens’ Assembly.

An excellent diagram that outlines the core principles of the proposed BC-STV system including how the voting process would work.

There are those who support a STV for BC and those who are against a change. To help you make up your mind it is important to consider the points raised on both sides of the debate as well as understand the basic premise behind a single transferable voting system.

The Yes BC-STV Position:

If B.C. voters turn down this second chance to discard the existing undemocratic first-past-the-post (FPTP) voting system, it will send a message to political élites that they can ignore the issue of electoral system reform for a long time. The choice is stark and limited: voters can choose to keep the existing FPTP system or opt for the single transferable vote (STV) form of proportional representation (PR), as recommended by the B.C. Citizen’s Assembly.

The problems with the current system are well known by now: phony majority governments, uncompetitive elections, unrepresentative results in terms of party representation and our social diversity, strategic voting pressures, and so on. And yet progressives forces in B.C. appear to be, at best, half-hearted and divided about the decision they have to make.
A considerable academic literature exists detailing the flaws of B.C.’s traditional first-past-the-post (FPTP) voting system. We call it “representative democracy,” but how well does it represent what individual voters want? How well does it represent the collective votes cast for each political party? How well does it represent the social diversity of our society? The answer in all cases is: not very much, if at all.

The No BC-STV Position:

Adoption of BC-STV would merge the 85 single-MLA constituencies that will be used in the 2009 election into 20 multiple-MLA electoral areas with populations of 200,000 to over 300,000. With STV's electoral areas it is possible to elect all the candidates for an area from one community, leaving others with no effective representation.

It is easy to understand our current system where there is one MLA to be elected and the winner is the candidate who receives the most votes.

Supporters of STV say voting is as simple as 1, 2, 3, but the numbers are not separate votes. Two to seven MLAs would be elected in each of the 20 areas, but you only get one vote, hence the word single as the first word in STV. The numbers are used differently for each voter in the complicated counting rules in which fractions of some votes get redistributed (transferred) but the voter doesn't control the size of the fractions.

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.