The debate over changing B.C.’s electoral system running on The Tyee has kicked up another debate of sorts.
Did NO-STV spokesperson David Schreck purposefully misrepresent a University of Victoria academic?
“He’s taking things I said out of context,” political science professor and BC-STV proponent Dennis Pilon told The Tyee. “He’s trying to use things I said like they’re supporting things he said.”
The fracas stems out of a CKNW debate between Schreck and Pilon broadcast last month. Schreck has often made reference to Pilon’s radio comments in an ongoing Tyee series about BC-STV.
Pilon is upset because he supports voting reform, and claims Schreck referenced his comments to buoy the campaign against it. Pilon took particular fault with this passage from Round 1 of the Tyee series:
In a debate on CKNW, STV supporter and political science professor Dennis Pilon said: "If you go to Ireland and you ask them, do you understand how the vote count works, they'll tell you 'no.'" Pilon then declined to explain the count to the audience!
How votes are counted in single transferable vote (STV) system is a source of confusion to many people. Read a brief explanation here.
Pilon said his comments were part of a larger discussion about Ireland’s experience with an STV system, which the Irish voted twice to support.
Pilon also takes fault with an exchange from Round 2 where Schreck quotes the academic as saying “most people vote party with STV.”
Pilon argues this line was taken from a larger discussion about voting patterns under any system, and Schreck shouldn’t have cherry picked information to support his position.
“I stand by every word I said and I refer people to the CKNW audio archive to listen for themselves to the debate,” Schreck said, when contacted by The Tyee.
He accused Pilon himself of being disingenuous. Ireland did vote for STV twice. But that was 50 years ago. Many people now have misgivings about the system there, he said.
“So far from quoting him out of context, I could have made a stronger case that the Irish are going a different direction from what he alleges,” Schreck said.
Sound complicated? You’re not alone.
Geoff Dembicki reports for The Tyee.
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Grumpy
3 years ago
The NDP hate STV..........
........because they want to be all powerful gods when they get to run things.
STV is one of change, making a bad situation better. Saying no to STV just pander to political parties backroom boys and girls who want to have unfettered power.
cocean
3 years ago
What Grumpy said
... although it's not "the NDP" that hates STV so much as certain insiders along with certain of the party's union supporters (in the upper echelons) who do.
A poll a couple of weeks ago indicated that the highest support for STV was among supporters of the Greens (then 76%) and NDP (then 65%). So it's not the NDP per se, not even their membership at large, but certain Dippers who thirst for power at the expense of voters rights. Why? Well, Christy Clark has an explanation, which she give on air yesterday on CKNW.
Agree with Clark's politics or not, she's right about this.
David Lewis
3 years ago
explain STV, forget this bull#$@t
some say the way votes are counted under STV is "unspeakeably obtuse". I think I would agree.
Have you ever tried to explain to someone exactly how their principal payment increases and their interest declines each month as they make payments on their mortgage? Or how to calculate the real rate of interest on an ordinary loan? People don't know exactly how these things work, yet many use them routinely, and public discussion does not center on some supposed difficulty in understanding exactly how they work.
One CBC radio show purporting to discuss STV just stated it was all too complicated to explain on the radio, and if people wanted to know more about it they should go to the website. Its preposterous. Its a failure of journalism.
What is simple to understand about STV is that it is a proportional system, and that unlike all other proportional systems, all representatives are directly elected by voters rather than selected by parties from lists.
It delivers a proportional result, to the astonishment of some analysts, because it allows a voter to vote for more than one party, and because, in a typical riding, only about 20% of the voters have to give you one of their first choices in order for you to win.
You'd think the main debate would be over whether BC should move to a proportional system or not, yet this is not what I'm hearing. We can expect opponents of the system to attack using any tools they can find, and supporters to gloss over whatever weak points the system has, but where is the independent coverage that makes any sense?
Tony
3 years ago
Schreck Wrong About Irish Support for STV
In 2002, Ireland had an All-Party Constitutional Review Committee review their electoral system. They concluded, among other things, that STV there has "manifest and well-recognized virtues, including proportionality, responsiveness to public choice, and continuity, which together have garnered for it substantial and enduring popular support." (http://www.constitution.ie/reports/7th-Report-Parliament.pdf, page 27). Over 75% of the politicians there ranked STV as their #1 choice for an electoral system (about 20% wanted either MMP or a party list system, and only 1% wanted to switch to First Past the Post).
Speaking of the proposed Mixed Member Proportional option they considered, the committee had the following to say: "significant elements of power and choice are removed from the voters in constituencies, and transferred to party leaders and managers, whose determination of the ordering of lists would normally be crucial. ... it seems highly unlikely that a change of this nature, which would be seen as advantaging parties and disadvantaging the individual voter, would be received well by the public" (p28).
The committee concludes that "no change [to STV] is necessary or desirable", arguing that "Finally, and decisively, there is no evidence of serious or widespread public discontent with the existing system: on the contrary, there is in our view a strong and enduring attachment to it. The fundamental and insurmountable argument against change is that the current Irish electoral system provides the greatest degree of voter choice of any available option. A switch to any other system would reduce the power of the individual voter" (p29).
Schreck's claim that the Irish don't like STV is just another example of his general strategy of making undocumented assertions and spreading misinformation.
Tony
3 years ago
ACE Project Also Says Irish Don't Want Change
The ACE Project, a partnership of Elections Canada, EISA, Instituto Federal Electoral - Mexico, IFES, International IDEA, United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs (UNDESA) and the United Nations Electoral Assistance Division, makes the following statement about the Irish attachment to STV:
"We can, though, say that there is no sign that the electorate in the Republic of Ireland would like to replace it by any other system."
See full article at http://aceproject.org/ace-en/topics/es/esy/esy_ie.