Our current, winner-take-all voting system distorts election outcomes and gives us phony majority governments, sometimes with less than 40% of the votes, sometimes with fewer votes than the largest opposition party. It throws up barriers to the election of women and minorities, distorts geographic realities, and fails to offer Canadians real political choices or the ability to hold political parties accountable. Proportional voting systems have been used in most developed countries for decades.
Our current, winner-take-all voting system distorts election outcomes and gives us phony majority governments, sometimes with less than 40% of the votes, sometimes with fewer votes than the largest opposition party. It throws up barriers to the election of women and minorities, distorts geographic realities, and fails to offer Canadians real political choices or the ability to hold political parties accountable. Proportional voting systems have been used in most developed countries for decades.
I think it would be best if we implemented a full blown liquid/deliberative democracy process, but changing the first-past-the-post voting system to a proportional one is worth doing right away too. If we want this to happen though, we have to come to an agreement on which design is best. It seems to me that Mixed Member Proportional is a bit better than Single Transferable Vote.
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