This is not part of my presentation, but the town hall meeting for the sitting member for Brandon-Souris is this Saturday, the 24th, at Trails West. Someone has said it wasn't happening.
I'm in the minority, here, because I do not understand all these methods of voting. I have read and researched, and I still don't understand.
I attended a town hall meeting for an MP in Winnipeg. That's not my riding but I attended, thinking that these methods were going to be explained to me. They were not. He had a slide presentation. He told us he was doing the Coles Notes version. When he got to proportional voting, he said it was too confusing to explain. Mixed proportional representation is more confusing and it's very complicated.
When and how are we going to learn how a new system would work? Low voter turnout has been talked about. I would think that if people do not understand how the system works, they will not even bother to show up to vote.
From what I have read, in my riding I could end up with an MP I have never heard of, let alone met. This person could potentially know nothing about the area or the makeup of the riding. How can that be good for the local riding? I think this would further increase low voter turnout.
As for mandatory voting, Canada is still a free country, and I think that would go against the charter of rights. However, aside from the charter, I believe that if people are forced to vote, you will see a lot of rejected and spoiled ballots because people won't want to participate.
Online voting is an issue that scares me. If someone can hack the CRA website, how do you think they're not going to hack our voting and skew all the data that might be in it?