Electoral Reform committee  There is such evidence. The U.K. provides some interesting examples on that point. You may remember that in the early eighties a new party, the SDP, arose in Britain. It was basically Labour Party members on the right and Liberal Party members who thought that they could rewrite

Electoral Reform committee  It has the effect of reducing the set of political options for voters, and also the set of political ideas that are out there.

Electoral Reform committee  It may arise out of power broking, but it also has muting effects on—

Electoral Reform committee  Yes, they're in a legislature without power.

Electoral Reform committee  I think that's a fair statement.

Electoral Reform committee  At the risk of repeating myself, let me repeat an answer from before: under proportional representation you may get precisely the MP or the party you most prefer, but that party may have no power.

Electoral Reform committee  It would not, because under majority voting the gap between two candidates is irrelevant. If you rank A over B, that's the only datum that matters, and the size of the gap is not taken into account.

Electoral Reform committee  Yes, for alternative voting that kind of consideration is important, because it might determine which candidate gets eliminated first, but for majority rule.... Let me step back. You're right that theoretically there is no voting method that is always immune from strategic votin

Electoral Reform committee  I don't feel, as an outsider, that I'm sufficiently expert on that question. I was asked about whether a referendum would be necessary to make this legitimate. I don't have a well-informed view on that point. I would have to know more about the details of politics in Canada.

Electoral Reform committee  You're right. There is a possibility that no candidate will emerge as the true majority winner in the sense that the candidate beats each of the other candidates by a majority. This was a possibility recognized by the creator of majority rule, the Marquis de Condorcet, who was an

Electoral Reform committee  Where a majority rule is used, or alternate....?

Electoral Reform committee  No, majority rule has not yet been used in national elections. Of course, alternative voting has.

Electoral Reform committee  As I was suggesting before, I think an important reason that until fairly recently majority rule, rather than alternative voting, was not on the table is simply that counting ballots under majority rule was somewhat more complicated. You have to look at all pairwise comparisons.

Electoral Reform committee  It's by giving voters the opportunity to put their favourite candidates, whoever they might be—even someone who has little chance of winning—first on their ballots. Under the current system, if I vote for an unpopular candidate, a candidate who is unlikely to win the seat, I'm in

Electoral Reform committee  Let's take your first question first. I think the easiest way to see the difference between alternative voting, which is sometimes called instant runoff voting, and what I was talking about, majority rule, is to use the example that is on the screen.