Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. I thank you for the opportunity to be here today to provide my input on the subject of electoral reform.
My name is Leonid Elbert, and I am here as an individual and as an author of the proposal for a made-in-Canada proportional voting system, the local transferable vote.
If you wonder about my credentials to design a voting system, my answer is I am a guy who is good with numbers. I also happened to be a concerned citizen whose interest in electoral reform dates back to early 2000. I took the trouble to study different electoral systems, to do the math to check what the results would have been if any of those systems had been used, and to come up with a voting model that I believe is the best option for Canada.
Let me explain what makes it the best option. When it comes to voting reform, the two most seriously suggested alternatives are the mixed member proportional, the MMP, and the single transferable vote, the STV. The MMP supplements existing first-past-the-post voting with original seats to make overall results proportional. It is the easiest alternative to implement, practically a quick fix, and as such, it is very popular. However, just as any quick fix, it comes with many drawbacks. Problems start with a question: how exactly shall we choose the candidates to fill those original seats? They don't stop there. With the overall seat distribution determined by the original ballot, the MMP places greater emphasis on voting for a political party rather than for a local candidate. MMP is also prone to quite frequent clean sweeps or wrong winner situations when a party wins so many local seats that there aren't enough original seats to offset the distortion. The latter could even be noticed in the report released by the Law Commission in 2004.
And that brings us to another major alternative, the STV, a voting system that delivers proportional results without compromising personal accountability. Under STV, individual candidates matter more than their party affiliation and preferential voting allows everyone to vote his conscience without splitting the vote, but STV uses multi-member constituencies. And that is not something most Canadians are comfortable with.
I'm not even talking about the north with the spacious ridings. Even here in New Brunswick, many would not be comfortable with a province only having two or three local constituencies, even if they elect three to five MPs each.
My proposal, the local transferable vote, combines the best of the two worlds. It allows us to retain local constituencies, to have as many of them as we would under a typical mixed member system. On top of that, a local transferable vote also delivers all the advantages the STV has to offer: preferential voting; 100% local nominations; and equal opportunities for all candidates, including the independents.
All the technical details are outlined in a brief that I submitted to the committee on September 7, 2016. This is my proposal, which I offer for your consideration. I strongly encourage you to think outside the MMP-STV dilemma and to choose a system that encompasses the advantages of both. That system again is the local transferable vote, a voting system designed in Canada for Canada.
Thank you.