Electoral Reform committee  As I showed you in that example, candidate B is the majority winner because B beats A by a majority, and B also defeats C by a majority. However, if we use alternative voting, instant runoff voting, then we'd look only at first-place votes, so 40% vote for A, 35% vote for C, an

Electoral Reform committee  Well, proportional representation is not an entirely new system. It's used widely around the world, and very successfully.

Electoral Reform committee  It would be a much bigger change than moving to alternative voting or majority rule. Alternative voting, in this example, doesn't work very well, because it eliminates the majority winner, but by and large it's a much better system for capturing the majority will than first pas

Electoral Reform committee  The difficulty is that when the electorate is not homogenous, and yet a decision has to be made, a majority must be found one way or the other. That's inevitably going to mean that some voters' views are not taken into account. Even under proportional representation, which comes

Electoral Reform committee  Yes. I'm not proposing that it's the right way of doing things, but it's the mandated way of doing things.

Electoral Reform committee  Majority rule, as I've defined it, is not currently used in cities, largely for historical reasons. Until fairly recently, we haven't had the ballot-counting technology to make it viable. It is used by many professional societies, but those are smaller groups than cities. Howeve

Electoral Reform committee  Yes, Berkeley too. The evidence suggests that it's worked pretty well, so we do have experience with it.

Electoral Reform committee  I'm not sure about Cambridge, because it's been using alternative voting for so long now that I no longer recall exactly how it came into being, but for the cities that have more recently adopted it, yes, that's right.

Electoral Reform committee  This is not something that I've studied closely enough to have a well-informed opinion. At the national level in the U.S., state legislatures are empowered with the right to change the electoral system, so at least at the national level, we don't throw things open to a referendum

Electoral Reform committee  First, I agree with Mr. Loewen that a small party that becomes part of a coalition will tend to have an outsized proportion of power by virtue of keeping that majority alive. However, by the same token, small parties that are not part of the governments in proportional represen

Electoral Reform committee  Here I think I share some of the concerns of Mr. Loewen. Proportional rule has worked very well in many countries around the world. However, for Canada, it would represent a very substantial departure, a much bigger departure, from the current system than majoritarian systems,

Electoral Reform committee  Yes. First, on the issue of ballot simplicity, which I agree is important, at the moment a ballot lists candidates who are standing. What I am proposing is that instead of just checking off one of those names or filling in a circle or pushing a button for one of those candidate

Electoral Reform committee  That's right.

Electoral Reform committee  That's right, not in their district. There will be MPs elsewhere who might be closer to their political position.

Electoral Reform committee  Yes, that's possible. As I suggest in my brief, if what you want is a perfect match in Parliament to political opinion, if 25% of the people think this way and they will have 25% of the MPs, then proportional representation is the way to do that. There are many strong points