When electoral reform is being discussed, the main argument against the existing system is that it produces distorted results. The fact that political parties can win majority of seats with just 40% of the vote is the one mentioned most often. Others also note that the "First Past The Post" system might as well lead to a situation when a party gets the most seats despite finishing second in the popular vote - just like in the recent New Brunswick election or in the 1979 federal election. That's why when looking for a solution, they propose a Mixed-Member system; a system that would offset the distorted results from single-member constituency vote by adding MPs from the party lists.
There is however one issue that is often forgotten. One of the biggest drawbacks of a single-member plurality system is that it encourages strategic voting, thus preventing many from voting their conscience. Every time there are more than two candidates in a riding, some of the voters face a tough choice: If they vote their conscience, supporting a candidate that has little chance of winning that would draw away votes from a leading candidate they might have supported, thus making it easier for another leading candidate (which they oppose) to win the riding.
Before you say that strategic voting only hurts small parties like the CHP or the Greens, think again. Take a look at the Strategic voting guides, prepared by the "Democratic Space" website for the supporters of all three major political parties. Conservative supporters in Quebec as well as urban ridings were advised to vote Liberal - unless they wanted the Bloc or the NDP candidate to win the riding. The NDP supporters got a list of ridings where they better vote Liberal. Even the Liberals were advised to vote strategically in as many as 13 ridings, where the race was mainly between the Conservatives and the NDP. They were suggested to vote for the party they hate the least since the Liberal candidate had little support. Sounds like a catch 22, doesn't it? There's little support for a candidate since people don't vote for him and people don't vote for him because he has little support...
Unfortunately, the mixed-member proportional system does little to address the issue of strategic voting. Despite its goal to make the final seat distribution match the popular vote, the system still leaves more than enough room for strategic voting. First of all - on a local ballot. At least half (if not two thirds) of the MPs would still be elected from single-member ridings - just as they are now. So the voters would still have to choose whether or not they should vote strategically. Yes, voters could choose to vote their conscience, looking forward for the party list vote to offset the distortion. Or they could vote strategically on a local ballot, supporting the party list of their choice on a party ballot. But either way voters may eventually end up in a situation when one of the leading parties sweeps so many local seats that there wouldn't be enough list seats to compensate the underrepresented parties.
It happens all the time in Germany where only 50% of the legislature members are elected locally. Despite the very high qualifying threshold (5%), additional seats must be added after each election to make sure the number of seats received by each party corresponds to its share of the popular vote. The Law Committee which proposed the Mixed-Member proportional system in 2002-03 admitted that a recommended 60:40 split between local and regional candidates wouldn't have been enough to offset the Liberal overrepresentation in Ontario during the federal election of 2000.
But what about the party ballot? Wouldn't it allow voters to vote their conscience? Not always. A vote for a party that doesn't meet the qualifying threshold would still be a wasted vote. Again that's not necessarily a party that wins less than 1% of the vote in Ontario. A vote for a party that has less than 10% support in New Brunswick would also be a wasted vote because the province only has 10 seats. With the vote reminders being rounded using a mathematical formula, people would be compelled to vote strategically, supporting bigger parties to make sure that the final number of seats is rounded up, not down.
The best solution to address strategic voting is by using a preferential ballot. When a voter can rank candidates according to his choice, he doesn't need to worry about splitting the vote. If his first choice candidate has little support, the vote is not wasted but transferred to the voter's second choice. But using preferential ballot in single-member constituencies will bring us back to the two-party system (no matter who is voter's first choice, his vote will end up being transferred to one of the two leading candidates). That's when multi-member constituencies come into play - lowering the threshold, thus making the results much more proportional.
Ireland uses 3 to 5-member constituencies. Even though the 16% to 25% thresholds for individual candidates may look too high, the seat distribution in the Dali (the Irish Parliament) is quite close to the popular vote. (With as many as 13 Independents elected, compared to only 1 elected in Canada.) In Canada, creating 2-3-member constituencies for rural areas and 4-6 member ridings for the cities would provide high degree of proportionality. At the same time, using preferential ballot and transferring vote reminders to voters' second choices (instead of using a mathematical formula) would allow every voter to vote his conscience.
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