Electoral Reform

The Electoral Reform is not as revolutionary or daring as we often think of with such fundamental changes. In fact Canada is behind this movement of Electoral Reform when compared to other Democratic Countries in the world today.

FPTP is the ancient system that most progressive Democracies have moved away from decades ago. There are basically two other popular Voting Systems used in the Democratic World - STV and MMP. I will go into each of these two options in later posts. Here we will look at where in the WORLD these systems are used.

Single-Transferable-Vote (STV);

Republic of Ireland     -      Parliamentary elections (since 1921) - European elections - Local government

Malta      - Parliamentary elections - European elections  -  Local government

Northern Ireland    Regional assembly elections  - European elections - Local government

Scotland   -  Local government (since 2007)

India  -  Upper House of Parliament elections

Pakistan -  Senate elections

Australia  -  Senate elections - in various states use STV in a mixture of elections

New Zealand - some local government elections  - local health board elections

United States  -  city election in Cambridge, Massachusetts - certain city elections in Minneapolis, Minnesota starting in 2009

Iceland  -  first used in Constitutional Assembly elections in 2010

 One can easily see that STV is not revolutionary in its proposal. STV is just a method to EMPOWER the DEMOCRATIC PROCESS and in establishing the rightful respect to the VOTER. It is hard to believe that Pakistan is more DEMOCRATIC in its use of the VOTE than CANADA. 

Mixed-Member Proportional representation (MMP);

This form of Electoral System is used in Germany and New Zealand with Lesotho in 2002.

Not as extensive a list as the STV but it is still used and has even been recommended in other parts of CANADA, not passing as of yet.

Electoral Reform is what we need to make our System of Government more DEMOCRATIC. When the reform is done properly the Electoral System will EMPOWER THE VOTER. The current system of FPTP EMPOWERS THE POLITICIAN.