Voting Reform

Inhumane cruelty has been with us for a very long time and it didn’t start in the new land, later called America. It began with those who lived long before any of us were ever thought about. For those who read the bible, the evidence is within the pages. The…

And give Republican Senators the ability to do the right thing. — The Democratic House of Representatives has impeached President Trump, and the trial is ongoing in the United States Senate. No honest observer of these proceedings has any faith that enough (or for that matter any) Republican Senators will join with their Democratic colleagues and remove Trump from office. There…

The consensus opinion coming out of this week’s leaders debate is that the big losers are Canadian voters. Highlights from Monday’s debate feature Prime Minister Trudeau and Conservative leader Scheer talking over each other collectively making themselves unintelligible. It wasn’t pretty. The October 8th report from “CBC: The World at Six”, featured disaffected voters who are basically vowing “a pox on both their houses”.

… and Proportional Representation ain’t it. Advocates of electoral reform will often promote some form of proportional voting system. PR advocates point out that our current first-past-the-post system creates divisive politics. They point out that majority governments are formed with only 40% of the popular vote. …

When discussing voting method reform, we often talk about concepts like the majority criterion, which requires that “If one candidate is ranked first by a majority (more than 50%) of voters, then that candidate must win”. This seems like an obviously desirable quality, if you grew up with “democracy” being…