• London City Council just became the first government in Canada to abandon First-Past-the-Post
    11 replies, posted
[QUOTE]LONDON, ON, May 1, 2017 /CNW/ - Minutes ago, the City Council of London voted in favour of switching to a ranked ballot system for their 2018 municipal election. This unprecedented decision makes London City Council the first and only government, anywhere in Canada, to abandon First-Past-the-Post.[/QUOTE] [URL="http://www.newswire.ca/news-releases/london-city-council-just-became-the-first-government-in-canada-to-abandon-first-past-the-post-620949973.html"]http://www.newswire.ca/news-releases/london-city-council-just-became-the-first-government-in-canada-to-abandon-first-past-the-post-620949973.html[/URL]
Let's hope the rest of the world hops onboard. Also that is a very confusing name
[QUOTE=X6ZioN6X;52212253]Let's hope the rest of the world hops onboard. Also that is a very confusing name[/QUOTE] Which it's what?
[QUOTE=ChadMcGoatMan;52212267]Which it's what?[/QUOTE] Yes.
[QUOTE=01271;52212295]Yes.[/QUOTE] Oh London City
Hey, I live 150km from London [sp], Ontario[/sp]
[QUOTE=ChadMcGoatMan;52212170][URL="http://www.newswire.ca/news-releases/london-city-council-just-became-the-first-government-in-canada-to-abandon-first-past-the-post-620949973.html"]http://www.newswire.ca/news-releases/london-city-council-just-became-the-first-government-in-canada-to-abandon-first-past-the-post-620949973.html[/URL][/QUOTE] Change has to start somewhere.
[QUOTE=Luni;52212637]Change has to start somewhere.[/QUOTE] Yea only Canadians while Americans started theirs in Maine last year.
[quote=Article]Recent legislation in Ontario allows any of the province's 444 municipalities to use ranked ballots, but 443 Councils decided to keep the status quo. Electoral reform is difficult to achieve because incumbents rarely want to change the system that put them into power. What we saw in London tonight was rare: selfless leadership.[/quote] Reform from FPTP to IRV isn't exactly 'selfless leadership'. It's a very common misconception that ranked ballots somehow reduce the political power of major parties. They do not. In fact, the reason that Australia got ranked voting in the first place is because the government of the day lost a crucial by-election thanks to minor parties splitting the FPTP vote, so they implemented IRV to prevent that from ever happening again: [quote=https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swan_by-election,_1918]Shocked by the loss of a safe Nationalist seat to Labor, the Nationalist government was moved to initiate electoral reform and change the voting system to preferential voting (also known outside Australia as instant-runoff voting) as part of a rewrite of the electoral legislation, with the Commonwealth Electoral Act 1918.[6] While preferential voting had already been introduced at the state level in Western Australia (1907) and Victoria (1911) and had been considered at the federal level by Sir Joseph Cook's government (1913–1914), [b]it was only the "considerations of partisan advantage [and not] the finer points of electoral theory" that provided the impetus for the change.[/b][7][/quote] That's not to say that IRV is a bad thing; it reduces wasted votes and nullifies the spoiler effect. But the cost is that the voting process will be harder for the average person to understand, and it will only consolidate the power of whichever party has control of London, Ontario, and they can claim a stronger mandate by referencing this electoral reform.
[QUOTE=BF;52212831]That's not to say that IRV is a bad thing; it reduces wasted votes and nullifies the spoiler effect. But the cost is that the voting process will be harder for the average person to understand[/QUOTE] How is it hard to understand numbering the candidates in the order of preference when voting?
[QUOTE=DaMastez;52213029]How is it hard to understand numbering the candidates in the order of preference when voting?[/QUOTE] You would be surprised, that's part of why bullet voting is a phenomenon. It can be so bad that for federal elections here, you are told to preference every single candidate on the ballot paper, or they'd not count it and toss it away. But the real confusion for many would be in the actual vote counting process. A perfect example is when Burlington, Vermont, had their Mayoral election in 2009 under IRV. The plurality winner (person with most first-preference votes) did not win, which upset many people and led to the repeal of IRV there in 2010, despite IRV working perfectly as intended. Then you get clusterfucks like what happened at Frome [url]http://blogs.abc.net.au/antonygreen/2011/05/an-example-of-non-monotonicity-and-opportunites-for-tactical-voting-at-an-australian-election.html[/url] where the plurality winner would have won if about 30-300 of his own supporters actually voted for a rival candidate instead.
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