Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. Thank you for inviting me.
I'm here to tell you about an original voting method I've invented called the “every vote counts” system, or EVC for short.
My goal in developing this was to repair two glaring defects of first past the post: many votes are wasted votes, and seat distributions don't correspond well to the popular vote, or, as I like to put it, seat counts don't match vote counts. We need to ensure some degree of PR, even if it's not exact.
I'll start by saying that losing votes aren't the only ones wasted under FPTP; so are many of the winning votes. All a candidate needs to win a constituency is one more vote than the closest competitor. Votes in excess of that don't really matter. They're wasted. The voters casting those ballots could have stayed home on election day without changing the results.
With this in mind, I separated winning votes into two types: instrumental, those necessary to elect a winner; and superfluous, the excess ones. I experimented with a mixed member system, using equal numbers of constituency and proportional seats, whereby the instrumental votes elect the constituency seats and the losing and superfluous votes together elect the proportional seats.
The results were stunning. In nine sample simulations of real elections, eight provincial and one federal, the seat shares earned by the different parties corresponded to popular vote percentages with amazing accuracy—not precisely, but close enough to represent fair outcomes.
So version one of EVC was born. The instrumental votes elect the constituency seats. Losing and superfluous votes are entered by party into a pool of votes called the proportionality pool, or PP for short. Proportional seats are awarded to each party according to its share of the pool. Adding the two kinds of seats gives each party's final seat total.
I published the details of all of this in a booklet I mailed to all of the members of the original committee. Many of them aren't here today. It's the one I am showing, with a white cover.
I thought I was finished, but it was not so. One loose end kept nagging me: the problem of practical implementation. It's a problem that plagues all mixed member systems, including MMP.
If EVC were used in Canada, we'd have to cut the present number of constituencies in half, from 338 to 169. This would make constituency reorganization a very difficult task. I worried about this for a long time before I came up with a viable solution. Before I explain it, I have to digress for a moment to discuss another innovation of EVC, the concept of the vote weight ratio.
In mixed member systems, including MMP, losing votes never have as much elective power as winning votes. It always takes more losing votes to elect a single seat. The vote weight ratio is a measure of the relative difference in voting weights.
Take MMP, for example. In a typical MMP election, the vote weight ratio tends to average around 3:1. It takes three times more losing votes than winning votes, on the left side of the ballot, to elect a single seat, so the winning votes have three times the weight of losing ones. That's surprising, I know, but it's true. In contrast, the vote weight ratio in EVC elections is always much better, often lower than 2:1.
As just one example, if the last federal election had used MMP with the two kinds of seats equal in number, the vote weight ratio would have been 3.03. Under EVC it would have been 1.76, which is much better.
Now, back to the main theme. One way of solving the constituency reorganization problem would be to include fewer proportional seats relative to constituency seats, say, two-thirds the number. That would allow more constituencies to be available for reorganization. In my brief, I suggested a split of 210 to 140 for Canada. That's a two-thirds ratio, for a total of 350 seats. That would be feasible. Reorganization would be much easier with 210 seats to work with instead of 169.
There is a drawback, however, to this two-thirds option. In a mixed member system like MMP or EVC, decreasing the number of proportional seats entails a rise in the vote weight ratio. That's because fewer proportional seats are available for the losing votes to elect, so their relative weight drops. If you attempt this two-thirds solution for MMP, the vote weight ratio jumps from an average of 3.0 to 4.0. That's 4:1, and that's unacceptable.
For an EVC simulation of the last federal election, the ratio jumps from 1.76, which was good, to 2.48, and that's not very good. So I had to find a way of bringing it back down again. The solution to this new problem lay in modifying a basic feature of EVC, the status of superfluous votes. If you thought my interpretation before was a bit fishy, you were probably right. You were right. I've argued that superfluous votes aren't necessary to the election of constituency winners, and that's true, but it's not the whole truth. If the voters who cast those ballots had stayed home, the result wouldn't have changed. That's true, but they didn't stay home. They went out and voted for the winners, thereby contributing indirectly to the results by not voting for the losing candidates. If they had, some of those losers might have won.
Superfluous votes therefore do count toward the election of the winners, not directly but indirectly, by withholding votes from other candidates. This creates another problem. Superfluous votes have a dual value. They help elect the winners indirectly, but they also directly elect some of the proportional seats. It wouldn't be fair to assign them that much voting power. So what to do?
The answer was to split the value of superfluous votes into two portions, one indirect and one direct. I did this by introducing a new variable into the EVC model, a quantity I called q. I don't have time to explain the details of this except to say that q is a decimal fraction less than one that is multiplied by the superfluous votes to reduce their contribution to the PP, and this is the direct portion of those votes.
How does this q solve the problem of high vote weight ratios under the two-thirds option? It's simple. Remember that losing and superfluous votes both elect some of the proportional seats. If the superfluous votes are lowered in value relative to the losing votes in the PP, losing votes get to elect a greater share of those seats than they did before. They gain weight and the ratio goes down. For example, using a suitable value of q can lower the ratio for the federal election I mentioned from 2.48 to 2.0, which isn't bad at all, so the vote weight problem is effectively solved, making the two-thirds option feasible for EVC.
By the way, no such solution exists for MMP, because it doesn't recognize superfluous votes.
That's the EVC system as it now stands, the version I summarized in my brief. I don't think voters would have any trouble understanding its basic operation. They wouldn't need to know all these details to grasp the idea that if their votes didn't elect a constituency winner or weren't really needed, they would count toward electing a proportional seat. EVC is really very easy to understand.
To conclude, EVC achieves its goal of ensuring that no votes are wasted—that's rather obvious—and seat counts closely reflect the popular vote. That's a matter for empirical investigation, and I assure you that it's true.
Note also that under EVC, local constituency representation is preserved; badly skewed election results never occur; shutouts never occur; small parties are treated equitably; slim majority governments, believe it or not, are sometimes possible with a minority of votes; vote weight ratios are fair; proportional seats can be filled on the basis of regional and other important criteria like ethnicity, gender, and professional expertise; and no specious vote transfer procedures are necessary for all voters to have their say in choosing their government.
Ladies and gentlemen, your committee faces a tough challenge in persuading Canadians to accept whatever electoral system you finally recommend. In my opinion, your chances of success will be far greater if you offer them a fair, effective, made-in-Canada system they can understand.
I'm confident that EVC would fill the bill. I think Canadians would take to it like ducks to water and I urge you consider it seriously.
Thank you for listening.