10-23-2019, 06:10 PM
(10-23-2019, 02:59 PM)danbrotherston Wrote: Yes, it would "feel" different to you as a voter, but if you look at the actual composition of government, in places which use ranked ballots, you find that the government is not much more proportional than we have today. The data shows this quite clearly in practice. We don't need to test these things here as if we're some special flower, there are countries which have tried out all sorts of electoral systems. We can and should learn from them.
On the other topic, yes, a per vote subsidy is a good idea, ironically when it was removed, conservatives whined that it was giving money to someone you didn't vote for (which is fundamentally 100% false...it literally gives money to exactly who you voted for), and ignored the fact that this is exactly what the per dollar subsidy does. At a fundamental level, we need to solve this ability to lie to people, when the truth is complicated, and lies seem to fit the facts so well, it's almost impossible to convince people in these cases.
The purpose of ranked ballots, for me, is not to increase the proportionality of the government but rather to make a better choice in each election (including the 338 elections that happened this Monday past). I agree that in provincial and federal elections it may not make a huge difference but I think it’s pretty clear that it would improve municipal politics, especially in cases where some useless blowhard is able to win over a large field of reasonable candidates. I heard of a mayoral recall election in the States where the mayor was removed as a result of Question 1 (“should the mayor be removed”, with a Yes/No answer), was was voted right back in as a result of Question 2 (“who should the new mayor be”, with the usual bogus first-past-the-post system).
Yes, the thing that I found most annoying about the vote subsidy debate was the dishonest characterization of the per-vote subsidy as being a drain on the treasury, as if there wasn’t a long-standing per-dollar subsidy that was already taking a bunch of government funds. I can absolutely respect the views of somebody who thinks there should not be a per-vote subsidy, but not if their complaint is that the government is sending money to political parties, unless they are also opposed to the per-dollar subsidy. Of course you’ll notice that Trudeau hasn’t brought back the per-vote subsidy.