The experience of the British Columbia exercise was not encouraging. The major paper in the province, the Vancouver Sun, assigned a full-time correspondent for the entire year, and the assembly and all its work was covered in enormous detail. The newspaper published the entire report in full in the newspaper, yet we know that when most people came to the polls, they really knew nothing about it.
I'm really loath to admit this, as a political scientist, but it turns out that most people don't go to bed at night thinking about electoral systems and dreaming about possibilities. It's the truth, so the challenge of educating would be enormous and I think most people would learn simply by doing, the first time.
If I had a simple-minded solution—this is one that Wiseman is really going to hate—it would be the power of compulsory voting, because I think that would produce enormous incentives for the political parties to get out and educate large numbers of voters.
Large parts of campaigns are spent now identifying the vote and getting people to the polls. You all know that; you live by that. If you have compulsory voting, parties don't need to spend nearly the same kind of time identifying voters and getting them to the polls, because they're going to get there. I think one of the experiences of Australia is with compulsory voting. It means the parties spend an awful lot of time trying to educate the people who are going to show up about what's at stake and what their policies are.
What you want to do is create a system in which parties and active participants who have something at stake are actively engaged in educational work.