Good evening, committee. My name is Raymond Li.
Time is short and ideas are complex, so I must gloss over some details. Most of these ideas I have posted on Mr. Dave Meslin's website, 100 Remedies for Broken Democracies, so you can find out more details about it.
The first idea is that ranked ballots and proportional representation are not mutually exclusive. You can do both. You can have a ranked ballot, then you count everybody's first choice for the purpose of deciding which parties get how many additional proportional members for the purpose of proportional representation.
A gentlemen earlier said that he didn't want ranked ballots, because then his first vote doesn't count because he's voting for a minority party. This takes care of that, because the first vote still counts for the proportional representation part.
The second idea is a close runner-up to proportional representation. A couple of other speakers have already alluded to this. Instead of having a party put a list together of people who are not elected or running a campaign, the people who lose by the closest margin should get those proportional seats from the party that gets the additional seats. In this way, in the riding where the contests are the closest, you get that additional member. The second member, the proportional member as opposed to the elected member, is going to, in most cases in a divided riding, vote against the first one, and they will cancel each other's vote out, so you don't get that double vote. On issues that are of mutual consent in a riding, where everybody agrees, those two members from that riding will agree.
You can also end up with a person who wins by a squeaker. Should somebody who wins by one vote get the whole voice from that riding? No, if you win by only one vote, your opponent also gets in, and then the next election, both of you can campaign as incumbents.
I have more reasons for that, but I won't go into them now.
The final point, just a quick side point is, right now we announce vote counts in the east coast way before the polls close in the west coast. The electoral officer has said this is a problem in an electronic age, but you can't close that down. The simple solution to that—