Not Commonly Used

Charge: It doesn’t make sense to change to a system that is not commonly used. STV was designed for smaller constituencies which is the reason it is used by only two countries nationally (Ireland and Malta). It is unproven in a similar situation to ours.

It is used successfully at a national level in Ireland, Malta, and for the Australian Senate and regionally in many countries. In fact, the Irish government has held two referendums to try to remove it but the people want to keep it and voted for it to stay both times. STV is used in the Australian senate with even larger constituencies than ours. They have a fairly similar population/area ratio as BC yet fewer candidates to elect.

Now for the details…

Quoted from D.Huntley and M.Wortis (1) :

“…the voting public should like STV because it will give the people more say in

government. STV has been used in Ireland for over 80 years; the politicians have twice tried to get rid of it in two separate referendums, but the voters voted to keep it.

If politicians are left to decide on a voting system, they usually do not choose STV, which is why it is not found in common use. Besides Ireland, it is used in Malta, for the Australian Senate, the Upper Houses of all the Australian States, the Lower House of Tasmania, and the Australian Capital Territory Legislative Assembly. Northern Ireland uses STV, and STV is used in local elections in several places.”

Quoted from Antony Hodgson (2) :

“It is used nationally in Australia, which has a population of 20M and an area of 8M sqkm, while BC has 4M in 1M sqkm, so they're roughly comparable on a population/area basis. In fact, they elect 76 senators while BC elects 85 MLAs, so each Ozzie senator represents 250,000 people, about 5X as many as a BC MLA. There's really no link between constituency size and whether or not a voting system works.

Also, Canada is the last major industrialized country in the world to have no proportional representation system within its borders - Great Britain has PR in Wales, Scotland, Northern Ireland and for the European Parliament and even the US uses PR in several US cities (Cambridge, Minneapolis, etc). Are we really that much smarter than all other industrialized countries, or have they maybe figured out some democratic innovations that it's high time we adopted?”

(1) Proportional Representation, Local Representation and More Voter Choice by David Huntley and Michael Wortis, http://www.stv.ca/download/BCSTV_Huntley_Wortis.pdf

(2) Scott Yee's Comments (Part 2) by Antony Hodgson, http://thetyee.ca/Blogs/TheHook/BC-Politics/2008/11/26/SilencedSpring/#comment