What if we had STV last time?

Posted May 3, 2009 by Sacha Peter - Link
Category: Referendum Comments (2)

Last Wednesday, Christina Myers of the Burnaby Now called me and asked me for some questions and comments about STV and how it would affect the newly proposed Burnaby-New Westminster STV electoral district. Some of the conversation can be found in the opinion page, What if we had STV last time?

But it’s a question that comes with plenty of assumptions, warns Sacha Peter, who maintains a website called B.C. Election 2009: The Race for Victoria. Peter, who is a parks commissioner in Cultus Lake and has worked on federal Conservative campaigns in the past, says politics is something he’s just personally interested in. He crunched the numbers to come up with a prediction about what the provincial results might have looked like riding by riding for his site.

It’s an exercise in curiousity, more than one of determining fact, he says.

“You have to look at those new riding boundaries and take each area and add up the popular vote, and you end up with approximately what it might look like,” he said. “But let me give a big disclaimer. If the way we vote changes, then those numbers change too. It’s not entirely appropriate to do that sort of analysis. The results that come out of it, it’s really almost impossible to say because you’re making assumptions about how people would vote.”

For example, with the Green Party – which he suggests might have ended up with three representatives – it’s difficult to say how voters would rank their preferences.

“With respect to third parties, it’s very mathematically easy to say that would happen – but whether that would actually happen or not is a very good question.”

Peter says the interesting question is not which party has more or fewer candidates, but which candidates within each party get the votes. If voters have a choice between several candidates from each party, would they vote for candidates in one party only or show a preference for candidates in different parties?

A similar situation would be in US Presidential elections – the case study of getting rid of the electoral college. If the President of the United States were elected based on an at-large country-wide popular vote, the nature of the election campaign would be drastically different.

Implementing STV would also change the nature of campaigning. It would not be better or worse, but it would be different.

The last paragraph alludes to the most interesting thought experiment of STV: Which individual candidates would get elected under STV had it taken place in 2005? Specifically in the Burnaby-New Westminster area we had the following candidates, ranked from most votes to least votes:

BC Liberal:
Richard Lee (10,421) (Elected in 2005)
Harry Bloy (10,054) (Elected in 2005)
Joyce Murray (9,645)
Patty Sahota (9,599)
John Nuraney (8,754) (Elected in 2005)

NDP:
Chuck Puchmayr (13,226) (Elected in 2005)
Pietro Calendino (10,365)
Raj Chouhan (10,337) (Elected in 2005)
Bart Healey (9,682)
Gabriel Yiu (8,355)

Green:
Robert Broughton (2,416)
Suzanne Deveau (2,192)
Richard Brand (1,763)
Carli Irene Travers (1,619)
Pauline Farrell (1,482)

It is more probable that John Nuraney would not have been elected under STV, while somebody like Pietro Calendino, would be. Anti-STV advocates are very correct in pointing out that the average voter, seeing 15 names on the ballot, would cringe. However, if they know one or two people, they can mark them down, without having to rank all 15 candidates.

The strongest candidates in an STV system, however, would be the ones that could gain cross-partisan support – maybe there is a voter that is leaning toward the NDP, but like some of the left-wing principles of candidate X. So the voter marks “1″ next to Chuck Puchmayr and “2″ for Pietro Calendino, while he marks “3″ for Joyce Murray. Candidates that are able to garner enough cross-partisan support will do much better in STV systems than they would presently.

The smartest question I have seen so far in the comment forms was the following, from Mike:

Has anyone explored the game theory involved in parties choosing the number of candidates to run in a district?

This has been academically explored, and also practically explored in Ireland’s elections. It is very similar to situations that municipal slates face when they decide how many candidates to run for city council – they want to run as many candidates as the seats they think they can capture plus a tiny amount more. But if you go over that, then the candidates will be competing against each other for the same vote base, which will compromise their chances. The method of counting votes in STV mitigates this (which is the biggest difference between municipal council voting vs. STV), but the campaigning that would take place in the meantime would be more damaging.

To explore this question in its entirety, however, would take a lot of words. It is not an easy question to answer.