After last week’s Federal Election resulted in a majority government with less than 40% of the vote, I have been heartened by the increased discussion of the need to reform our electoral system. Canadians – who I think have long been aware of the problem – are realizing that First Past the Post’s inherent problems [...]
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The results of last week’s Federal election have yet again shown clearly that our electoral system is indeed broken. 40% of voters have elected a Conservative government with 54% of the seats and 100% of the power. In addition, voter turnout – while slightly higher than in 2008 – was barely 61.4%. [...] After my earlier analysis of the election results, where I simply summed the votes of two (or all three) of the NDP, Liberal, and Green votes in each riding to see what impact that would have had on seat allocations, I wanted to do a more nuanced study. Not all Liberal voters would have chosen [...] Updated: May 4th with latest data from Elections Canada. I also improved my routine, catching a few small problems and able to calculate the number of orphaned votes in each case. Using the (preliminary) data from Elections Canada, I calculated what the seat distribution might have been like if two or more of the non-Conservative [...] I am cautiously in support of the proposed coalition between the NDP and Liberals, with the support of the BQ. The NDP and Liberals together do have a greater share of the popular vote than the Conservatives, despite their lower numbers of seats… so them having more power is something I approve of. However, obviously [...] Using the data from Elections Canada, I calculated what the seat distribution might have been like if two or more of the non-Conservative parties were merged into a fictional “United Party”. The results are below. Actual/Final results: CP 143 LIB 76 BQ 50 NDP 37 I 2 Orphaned Votes: 50.92% If “United Party” was comprised [...] Macleans: What if they gave an election and nobody won? A well-written article describing the sorry state Canada’s politics have boiled down to. Some choice parts: “If this election proves anything, it is that the process by which we elect our governments is broken. We are trying to run five-party politics through a system that [...] Based on the preliminary results from Elections Canada, less than half (49.04%) of the voters who cast a ballot on Tuesday ended up having their vote elect a candidate. That means 50.96% of the votes cast didn’t end up electing someone. My riding elected a candidate with just 32.22% of the votes – the lowest [...] Our Green Party candidate here has come in third place, in one of the closest elections I’ve witnessed here. Liberal: 32.22% Conservative: 29.18% Green: 21.15% NDP: 16.49% All things considered, I’m glad the Liberal won over the Conservative here. I will be writing a letter to him soon, after I’ve had more time to crunch [...] We suffer from an out-of-date voting system, one which favors strong regional support, and penalizes parties with similar levels of national support, but spread out. And every election cycle – Provincial or Federally – the politicians beg us to vote strategically to keep the other party out. It’s unfair and counter to the ideals of [...] |
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