Is it really so bad, and if so why was it ever adopted? Why is it so controversial? What systems are used elsewhere? Any clarification would be much appreciated! :)
Posted Oct 5, 2011, 11:08 PM UTC
This won't be ELI5 but hopefully it's clear enough you can understand it.
One problem as others have mentioned is that you can end up with people being elected while not representing the majority of the vote. For example here in England we have stronger third party candidates so you could win an election like this:
Party 1 has 32% of the vote
Party 2 has 33% of the vote
Party 3 has 35% of the vote
In this situation Party 3 wins with 35% of the vote and the election, but they doesn't represent 65% of the voting public who voted against them. There have even been some regional elections where there are several strong candidates where you only need about 20% of the vote to win, so the 20% can decide for the other 80%. This is why it's controversial as it's seen to be unfair when you end up with people being elected who don't represent the larger majority of the region/country.
If you want a good real example of this problem, in the last British general election there were three major parties and loads of smaller ones running for election, the three largest are the Labour Party, Conservative Party and the Liberal Democrat Party. To win the election and become the ruling party you need to get the most seats in parliament, so you have various local elections to pick the members of parliament.
Now at the last election in 2010 the Conservative party got 36.1% of the vote and 306 seats, the Labour Party got 29% and 258 seats, and the Liberal Democrats got 23% and only 57 seats. You can see that there is a 7% difference between those parties in votes won but the number of seats isn't reflected but the votes cast, the Lib Dems only got 7% less votes than Labour but get just over 4 times less seats in parliament? Seems unfair doesn't it?
This kind of system in my opinion encourages a two party system as people don't want a third party lowering the threshold required to become elected, every time you add a new party the threshold gets lower. In England (and i'm sure elsewhere) parties have even campaigned using this fear, i believe one slogan from the ruling labour party was "if you vote for charles kennedy (third party) you'll wake up with michael howard (current opposition leader)", basically saying that if you erode our majority by voting for the third party you'll end up with a party in power you didn't want.
This is why a lot of people would prefer a voting system called Proportional Representation (PR); from our previous example of the 2010 British election, if those results were from a PR election the seats in parliament would represent the percentage of the votes cast, so the Lib Dems would get 23% of the seats in the parliament instead of the ~9.5% they actually got.
Feel free to ask me any questions if any of that was unclear.
[deleted]
...not that a popular-vote or electoral-college system is any better in this respect.
Alternative Vote ftw!
Assuming canada has a usual First Past the Post vote, one problem is that the elected officials don't usually represent a fair breakdown of the population. Others point have been made by TheDoctor so I will stick to this one. It works like this:
Most areas are pretty demographically heavy in one category more than others. For example, the suburbs are very white, upper middle class, while the cities are more likely to have a high black population, and of course the territories have a high First Nations population.
Most people vote for someone like them, or that they think will represent them well.
The result is that the massive suburban population votes white upper middle class to rich politicians in, and either minorities do not get any representation at all in parliament or its from a less populated area and therefore less powerful.
The one alternative is called proportional representation. This basically means that instead of voting for an individual, you vote for a party.
Seats for one area, like a province, are portioned out with regard to what percentage of voters voted for that party. So if there are (made up number) a hundred seats for one province, and 30% of people vote conservative, 45% vote liberal, and 25% vote NDP, the conservative party will be given 30 seats to fill with their own members, and the same for the other parties.
Generally speaking, the parties try to allocate seats proportionally with the demographics of an area, though different countries do this differently. IE 80% white members, 20% black, or whatever the balance may be.
Check out this awesome video! It's a perfect explanation. It isn't long.
Came here to post that video too, he's very good in all his explanations so bone up on some of the other videos he's done too.
Yeah the day I found his channel I invested about 2 hours absorbing his wisdom.