Single Transferrrable Vote

What is STV

Single Transferrable Voting was designed by The Citizens' Assembly -- A comittee of regular citizens (as opposed to the usual set of self-interested politicians or their friends) to design a voting system that worked for the people of BC. It was designed to mazimize three principles:

Fairness of representation -- the parties' share of seats in the Legislature reflects their share of the votes
Local representation -- communities and regions are represented by elected MLAs
Voter choice -- voters have more options on the ballot, and thus more power

For many reasons, I believe that they did a good job of this.

In the upcomming election (May 12, 2009) we will have the opportunity to enable the results of the 3 years work that they put into the process. This may be a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, because most political leaders actually like the current 'first-past-the-post' system. It gives party leaders maximum control over both the legislature, and party members, while forcing many voters to make 'better of two evils' choices rather than voting based on their real preference.

The STV system is designed to address these problems (from the voting public point of view) while preserving regional representation.

How does STV Work

Short Executive Summary

Rank the candidates you like in order of preference (1st, 2nd, 3rd, 4th, etc). If there are some candidates you really don't like, just don't vote for them. Your vote will be counted in a way that minimizes vote Waste.

Longer Executive Summary

Although you only have one vote, it can help elect multiple candidates. Each region will elect between 2 and 7 candidates.

Once you've marked your preferences among candidates, the votes are calculated as follows:

All of the First preferences are counted. The number of votes needed to be elected is calculated.

If your preference is elected

If somebody has enough votes to be elected, then they are declared elected, and the proportion of excess votes are distributed to the next choice.

Some examples

If your first choice has 3 times as many votes as (s)he needs. This means that 2/3 of the votes are excess. In this case the excess 2/3 of your vote are transferred to your second choice.
If your first choice has twice as many votes as (s)he needs to be elected, then 1/2 of the votes are 'excess'. In this case, 1/2 of your vote will be transferred to your next choice.

If your preference is eliminated

Once all of the immediate winners are elected, if too few MLA's have been elected, then the candidate with the fewest votes is eliminated and the vote (or portion) for them is transferred to the elector's next choice.

(( for a complicated example we can continue with the second exasmple above -- where 1/6 vote is transferred to your third choice. If your third choice is then eliminated, then your remaining 1/6 vote would be transferred to your fourth choice ))

This process continues until you have the number of MLA's elected that are assigned to your district.

Isn't this all complicated?
This describs the mechanics of the counting. As a general citizen, you really only need to remember the short executive summary -- rank the candidates you like in order of preference. Elections BC gets to handle the rest.

For More information:

Yes to STV Campaign.

The citizen's Assembly who came up with the proposed system.

Thc CBC's STV site Includes a sample STV poll and results.

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