The single transferrable vote system is a system designed to reflect as closely as possible the preferences of voters. It works in single ridings where you only have one person, in which case it transforms itself into something else called an alternative system—but it works there as well. But its real utility tends to be when there are multiple persons to be selected from a voting process. It doesn't have to be an electoral process; it could be any process that is designed to select anything. That is the intent, to give effect to people's desires.
In terms of how it works, it's actually fairly simple for the voter. I would suggest that it is almost intuitively simple. What it does is that people go into a voting process and express their preferences, one, two, three, etc., in terms of whom they would like to see selected from that process. That's as complicated as it has to get for the individual.
Where it becomes somewhat complicated is for the administrators, who have to understand how the system works. There's a mathematical process associated with it.
The first thing that's done in terms of administrating and counting the votes is that you have to determine the number of votes required for a person to be successful. For members of Parliament and most other elections here in Canada now, with the “first past the post” system, that's fairly easy: it's 50% plus one. When you have more than one member, obviously that number changes. If you have three places, then you need to get one-third of the votes. If you have four places, then you need to get one-quarter of the votes, etc.
So there is a formula that determines the quota of votes necessary to be successful. All the quota is trying to do is to make sure that when the votes are counted.... Should you arrive at a situation where everybody splits their vote equally among all the candidates, and you have three places to be elected, the quota is designed to ensure that only three people can be successful, not four, just as 50% plus one means that one person gets 51% and the other 49%. There's only one person who can be elected. The quota is designed to ensure that if you have four places, only four people can get that number, not five. If there are three places, only three people can get that number. It's just a simple mathematical formula to determine how many votes you need, so that you're sharing the votes equally.
Once the quota is determined, then you start to look at the ballots and the preferences that have been expressed by the voters on those ballots. As I mentioned, the voter goes in and ranks the candidates on the voting list, one, two, three, four, etc., according to however many preferences they wish to express. And this bill has been designed to try to give as much flexibility as possible to the voter to decide how they want to follow that procedure. So if they only know one candidate and only want to vote for the one candidate, the bill allows them to just mark one and they will still have a perfectly valid ballot. If they know two candidates and they want to express their preferences about one and two, that's fine as well. If there are 17 candidates and they want to go from 1 through 17, they can do that as well.
So the intention of the bill is to give the maximum flexibility to the voters to express their preferences as they wish.
So far, we have determined the quota, that is, how many votes are required for someone to be successful. The next step in the process is to look a the ballots, and the first step is to count up how many first preferences the voters have expressed for all of the candidates. So you would look at the number of first-place preferences on the ballots and count up those. If I'm a candidate and the quota is determined to be 50 and I have 50-plus first-place preference votes, then my name goes on the list automatically. If, for example, there were three Senate places being considered for a province, and they count up all the first-place preferences and three people have more than 50 votes, then all three would go on the list and that would be the end of it.
It gets a little more complicated when you count up the first preferences and nobody makes the list, or one person makes the list and you still have two more. Then as a first step you take the successful person, and if they received more votes than necessary to be selected, you take their surplus votes and transfer them to other candidates who have not yet been successful. So you look at the second preferences on those ballots, and those votes, as expressed by the voter, are then transferred over to other candidates. Once that has been done, you look again to see whether those people have attained the quota, and if so, you stop; if not, you continue the process. And the process just continues on and on.
If at any point after the transfer of surplus votes—that is, I received more votes than I needed as a candidate and those have been transferred to other candidates—nobody has yet attained a quota and you still have places to fill, then you go to the other end and start dropping the candidates who received the least number of votes. You go to the end of the list, and the person who got the least number of votes is eliminated from the counting process. On those ballots, you look at who the second preference was, or the next available preference, and then you transfer those votes to the other candidates who the voters expressed as their second preference.
In this case, it would be number two, but if it were later in the process, the words in the bill refer to “the next available preference”. So it depends on where you are in the process.