On procedure and politics

Beginning to think is beginning to be undermined

Artificial preferences

There continues to be interest among many Canadians in the Alternative Vote (AV). Most recently the Liberal Party of Canada adopted a resolution calling for the implementation of a preferential ballot for national elections. This blog attempted to redo the May 2011 election using AV, and other bloggers have produced similar posts. This blog continues to [...]

Keyword Post: Answers to Questions on Election Outcomes

Following the recent election in the Canadian province of Ontario, I can see that there are a lot of people searching for very basic information about how our system of government works. While I have detailed posts answering most of these questions on this blog, I will provide shorter, basic answers to some of the [...]

Majority Government, Minority Support

(Note: You may also be interested in this post comparing various types of government.) A reader contacted me asking how a party can win a majority of seats, and thus form the government, but not have a majority of the popular vote. This is due to the voting system used in Canada and a few [...]

The May 2011 Canadian election under AV

(Note: If you are looking for statistical data re: the 2 May 2011 Canadian federal election, please visit Elections Canada or the Pundits’ Guide to Canadian Federal Elections [which uses Elections Canada data].) I came across a couple of blog posts written by people in the UK looking at what transpired in Monday’s general election [...]

The 2011 Canadian Federal election – initial thoughts

(Please see this post for an update – the May 2 election redone using AV.) I will write a more detailed post at some point in the future once final statistics are available. What follows are simply a few quick observations, mostly aimed at UK readers pondering how to vote in the AV referendum. Canada’s [...]

How are votes counted under AV?

Quite a few people seem to be looking for a clear explanation of how AV voting will work in the UK if the referendum comes to pass on May 5. I’ve posted this before, but here is a quick video that provides a very simple explanation, delivered in an amusing way: For those who want [...]

Is FPTP unconstitutional?

I confess that the following story, which began in 2004, flew completely under my radar – much to my chagrin. I only learned about this yesterday, but now that I am aware of it, I do plan to follow this case very closely. A legal challenge has been launched by a group in the province [...]

AV and fringe parties

(You may also be interested in this post for an overview of how First-Past-the-Post distorts elections results and makes it more difficult for smaller parties to win seats.) Despite the release of studies (such as this one by the IPPR) that have concluded that AV will not help fringe parties or extremist parties win seats [...]

More AV-related links for readers

1. Australian elections expert Antony Green has an excellent blog post addressing the oft-heard claim by anti-AV types that under AV, some voters’ votes will count more than others. This is false, of course – everyone gets one ballot and one ballot only. The difference is that some voters’ ballot will be transferred to another [...]

AV, FPTP and hung parliaments

I can only assume that growing interest in the referendum on AV in the UK explains why this older post of mine is getting so much interest these days. In that post, AV does not cause hung parliaments, I was trying to counter one of the NO2AV side’s favourite anti-AV arguments: that adopting AV would [...]

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