Comments | missruckus: seeking some electoral democracy.

missruckus

seeking some electoral democracy.

Oct 15, 2008 03:22

today's election results are depressing. that said, this first-past-the-post nonsense has got to go!

someone wrote this on facebook:

How do you 'win' an election, when 62% of the country voted AGAINST you? Only in Canada ( Read more... )

Comments 8

culpster October 15 2008, 13:38:39 UTC

The next question is: how do you win the referendum? And how do you explain PR to a "they're all crooks" skeptic so their eyes don't glaze over. Neither question ever got answered in Ontario.

I frankly find PR zealots to be...zealots. Although I agree that it's loooong overdue policy, they'll still all be crooks - frinstance if PR were in effect fifteen years ago we probably would have had a Campbell-Manning cabal out-voting the Liberals (?)

Again, still justified and necessary, but also a bit of a hobby horse IMHO :D

missruckus October 16 2008, 05:45:54 UTC

i don't know the answer to any of those questions..

but i guess i see that electoral reform is a winnable battle in our lifetimes, and i mean, let's face it, the revolution is unlikely to come any time soon.. which means we are gonna have to deal with elections whether we believe in electoral politics or not.. so at least having a more 'democratic' system in terms of who we have as our elected crooks would be better (if only marginally) than what we have now, imho.

culpster October 16 2008, 06:02:54 UTC

Sure, yeah, agreed. Not trying to be SuperCommie, like I said I want PR too. Some people act like it IS the revolution though ;)

You down with MMP or one of the other ones?

I was also wondering how differing systems address the issue of local representation...like if the local candidate I voted for won and then didn't get to sit because she got proportioned out, how would I feel about that? (I'm sure I could find out how this works myself if I was really desperate!)

missruckus October 16 2008, 06:09:55 UTC

yeah, i need to look more into alternative systems. they all seem to have their pros and cons. i don't really know enough about any of them to voice a solid opinion on them.. except to say that anything with at least some PR would be better than what we have now.

a friend of mine (who is originally from a small town in northern ontario) mentioned to me that a wholly PR system would be a loss for, say, rural folks who would not get the same amount of representation as urbanites due to population differences.. a good point i never thought of before.

whatever system we implement instead would need to address the issue of local representation plus PR, i would think..

do you know much about the system they are looking at out in BC?

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