Electoral Reform committee  The youth voter issue is a complex one. The research on voter turnout has shown that actually the problem isn't with university students—we've actually increased the voter turnout of university students—but with non-university students. We've seen a decline in youth voter turnout

Electoral Reform committee  It's rooted in the frustration that people have that parties get elected and then they don't do the things they promised. Part of that is the accountability issue: that people have difficulty making Party Right accountable to Party Left, or vice versa. Again, I think a move to a

Electoral Reform committee  As I've suggested, the higher normative principle that votes should count is what authorizes me to make the claim I do. The fact is that votes should be equal. That is a fundamental democratic idea. We use the voting system we do not because it was authorized by the people. Ele

Electoral Reform committee  I think you know my answer: yes. Yes, it's absolutely the place to start, because the place to start is to rebuild the trust with the electorate, and one of the ways we do that is by registering their preferences accurately. By registering their preferences accurately, you will

Electoral Reform committee  I think what I said was that it would change voter turnout. You're right that no voting system is going to change the problem of voter turnout, because the key thing to increase voter turnout is to increase direct contact between the political class and the individual. We know

Electoral Reform committee  The difficulty with that question is that people don't know what they don't know. What you get is a very “classed” response. Middle-class people often don't know anything more than poorer working-class people, but they have a stronger sense of entitlement. They think that you sho

Electoral Reform committee  We've had 10 successful voting system reforms at the provincial level. We have a lot of experience introducing different voting systems, and we've had experimentation at the local level. My book looks at 18 countries across 150 years, citing every instance of voting system reform

Electoral Reform committee  I think that's a misreading of sections 40 and 41. I don't think that one aspect is spent. For the parts of sections 40 and 41 that detail specific things that have been superseded, of course, those aspects are spent, but the intention of it clearly says that electoral matters

Electoral Reform committee  Who are you directing the question to?

Electoral Reform committee  Yes.

Electoral Reform committee  We want the result to reflect the reasoned opinions, the informed opinions. I don't think anyone would disagree with the idea that a legitimate outcome would be one in which we were confident the voters had the information and the capacity to participate, but I'm telling you that

Electoral Reform committee  Exactly, exactly. Both STV and MMP, the two models that are chosen most broadly around the world as alternatives, increase the power of the elector to see that their vote counts. In these cases 95% of the votes actually contribute to the election of someone, unlike our system, un

Electoral Reform committee  Well, I guess some people have floated that idea. I think my views have come through fairly clearly. I don't accept that the current system meets the democratic standard of the 21st century. It's a pre-democratic holdover. It's been kept in place because it served the partisan in

Electoral Reform committee  That was fairly clear in all cases, in P.E.I., Ontario, and British Columbia. The governments were fairly hostile to the process and put a host of barriers in the way of the systems working.

Electoral Reform committee  The alternative vote does not. The alternative vote has many of the same problems that first past the post has.