When a candidate with the most votes loses, we call it a losing plurality just to define terms, a plurality being the most votes, whether or not it's a majority—the most votes.
To explain losing pluralities, it's important to understand why they sometimes occur, but it's also important to consider their effects on the voters, parties, and candidates. SMDPR shifts focus away from individual candidate performance in ridings toward team performance by parties in regions, attempting to draft the best of each party for the proportionately allotted seats.
The only reason a person loses a plurality under SMDPR is that their party has already won so much that any more would be unfair. This is specifically because each vote is given equal voice in Parliament on a regional basis and not discarded among the wasted votes on a riding basis. Should Parliament be animated by the voices of the nation, or should those voices be silenced in ridings by the plurality rule? Would we rather accept that a candidate might sometimes lose with the most votes or that a majority government might rule with the fewest votes?
In exchange for a losing plurality under SMDPR, the voter gets a voice in Parliament, a local representative with a huge incentive to perform well, increased accountability of the MP in the next election, and an incentive to engage the system. Parties have incentives to contest every vote everywhere, are allotted appropriate partisan voice, and get mostly their best candidates elected. Candidates know that safe ridings and wasted votes can't preclude them from winning. It is possible to be elected in any riding, and they know their efforts help the party, whether they personally win or lose.
Plurality losses are not a defect of SMDPR. They correct the only defect of our current first-past-the-post system. First past the post is SMDPR with a region size of one, so there's very little change, in that sense.
To a losing plurality candidate I would say, “You did well, but other candidates in your party did better than you, and they took all the seats the people of this region wanted the party to have. The votes for you counted toward your party's success and, in fact, everyone's vote counted equally. That's democracy”.
I've heard the comments that there would be rioting in the streets and civil war. The only way to know if Canadians would accept some losing pluralities as the price for all the other things that you would get out of SMDPR is to ask them.
Thank you.