OK. here’s how it works in most places it’s been tried. In Canada you elect provincial and national M.P.s by the single-member-district system, don’t you? That is, the territory is divided into districts – I believe you call them “ridings” – of equal population, and you elect one member to represent each, by the winner-take-all, first-past-the-post plurality system. If there are three candidates in the riding, the one with the most votes wins, even if that’s less than 50%.
Naturally this tends to squeeze out the minor parties. E.g., if the New Democrats (my personal fave) have a 20% level of support throughout British Columbia – they still might not elect a single member to the provincial parliemant, because there might not be enough NDP supporters in any one riding to form a plurality.
Under a multi-member-district system, you would merge five existing ridings into one big riding electing a five-member delegation, and each member, ideally, is the choice of roughly one-fifth of the voters in the new megariding.
Single-transferable-voting is the mechanism for achieving that desired outcome. You, as a voter, needn’t worry about the mechanics of it, about how the votes are tallied; that’s the election office’s problem. (But you can read a good, concise explanation here: [ur]http://www.fairvote.org/factshts/choice1.htm.)
All parties contesting the election would nominate five candidates; there also would be room on the ballot for independent candidates affiliated with no party. When you vote, you would be given a rather long ballot listing all candidates standing for that riding (sorted and labelled by party, presumably); and you would pick your top five favorite names, rank-ordering them by preference. (See sample ballot at http://www.fairvote.org/consulting/choiceex.pdf.) E.g., if you are an NDP supporter you likely would pick the five NDP candidates, ranking them in the order the party leadership proposed them for listing on the ballot, or in some other order if you have a different opinion about their relative merits. (If the NDP has only 20% or so support in the riding it will get to elect only one member, so which one is an important decision – and under this system, the party’s grassroots supporters as well as the local party officials get to participate in that decision.)
Practical results:
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At present, “your” single M.P. might well be somebody you didn’t vote for or even very enthusiastically voted against. Under the system described above, you can vote with some confidence that at least one of your five choices will end up in your riding’s elected delegation. Somebody you can really talk to, you know?
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The elected parliament will be more diverse – that is, it will represent a wider range of viewpoints, from (by Canadian standards) far left to far right. The minor parties still won’t have much power in the way of votes, but they will have the right to participate in the debates, on the floor and in committees, and everybody else will have to listen to them.
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There probably will never again be a “majority” party in parliament. All government will have to be by coalitions or other power-sharing arrangements. No proposal ever will pass a vote unless it can drum up support from several very different political camps, supporting it for their own reasons or as the result of a logrolling bargain.
So that’s how it works. Still want it?