Thank you.
It's perfectly clear and has been since long before this meeting that there's an enormous passion and wish to move to some kind of proportional representation system. We all observed the struggles that we have listened to today, trying to make things work with MMP and STV. I want to try to think outside the box about some simple, cost-effective alternatives. Generically, the name is weighted voting. Now that can mean a lot of things to a lot of different people and I have to try to be brief. I'd like to explain background, motivation, and so on, but there isn't time. I'm just going to give one example.
I go to the poll and I get a ballot. The ballot contains a list of candidates and asks a simple question: Which one do you like? Now I would ask a second question, which you can consider or not, as you like, which is: Here's a list of parties; which party do you feel represents your point of view? I go to that poll and I see a candidate's name whom I've always admired, Jane Doe. She happens to be affiliated with the purple party, but that doesn't especially matter to me, because maybe I'm a pretty simple-minded voter. I'm for Jane Doe so I'll vote for Jane Doe. Let's suppose the rest of the people in my riding happen to agree and Jane sweeps the riding with 40,000 votes. Okay. A computer records that number of 40,000 and puts it into a little slot.
At the same time, other candidates have not succeeded, and in other ridings other purple candidates have not succeeded. Where another purple candidate has been defeated, or where someone else who didn't get the candidate they wanted happens to say, “I kind of like that purple party”, we gather up the weight of purple party votes and store that number away. We bring back the total number of votes that have been defeated in their selection of a candidate but have said “Gee, I kind of like this purple stuff”, and we divvy that out among the elected members of the purple party. Jane Doe, who got 40,000 votes, gets another 30,000 and goes to Parliament with 70,000 votes.