Archived: Quick Guide to Voting 2018

Due to Postal disruptions, Elections BC set an extended deadline to receive Referendum ballots of 4:30 Friday, December 7th, 2018, and encouraged voters to drop off their ballots in person rather than sending them through the mail. A list of drop-off locations was posted on the Elections B.C. website at http://elections.bc.ca/rso. (In Metro that included 22470 Dewdney Trunk Rd, 120 Lonsdale Ave, Lansdowne Centre, Brentwood Town Centre, Guildford Commerce Court, 180 Keefer St, 5754 Cambie St)

A Quick Guide to Voting:

Annotated sample referendum ballot

Want more details?

Take the short quiz at referendumguide.ca to see which of the four voting systems best fits with your values – that website was declared by Elections BC to be neutral.

The Elections BC Voter’s Guide was mailed to all BC homes, and is on the Elections BC website as well, but it is restricted to the mechanics of elections, not the pros and cons, so it is inadvertently biased toward the status quo.

Here at VotingBC the Pro Rep options are described briefly at Voting Systems as Gardening, Simple (MMP), and Questions and Answers, while the advantages of First-Past-The-Post are listed at 17 Reasons to Vote for First-Past-The-Post.

There are excellent extended descriptions of the three proportional options on the ballot on various sites including: Dual Member Proportional, Mixed Member Proportional, and Rural-Urban Proportional. Check out Fair Voting BC’s Scorecard.

The three Pro Rep voting systems all treat voters and political parties in an adequately proportional way (each group of voters getting their corresponding proportion of MLAs in the legislature). Although they use quite different mechanics, there would be very little practical difference between them in terms of the legislature and its output of legislation.

All three Pro Rep options on Question 2 of the Referendum ballot maintain local representation, improve regional representation, and ensure your vote really counts.

Some have noted that the Mixed Member Proportional system has been used in more than a dozen places while the two other systems are newly designed. While it might seem odd to put new systems on the ballot, the components of Dual Member Proportional and Rural-Urban Proportional are used elsewhere, and their combination to suit BC is only modestly innovative, not radical. We really can’t go wrong picking any of these three systems.

Problems with Elections BC Voter’s Guide

Elections BC sent out a Voter’s Guide but it’s not helpful:

Also please note, there have been numerous complaints that the description of the “Mixed Member Proportional” voting system in many sources (including the Elections BC Voter’s Guide) shows a foreign version that is NOT being seriously considered for BC:

The governing party has promised for months that, should MMP be approved by the electorate, it will be a version in which the voters, not political parties, choose the MLAs:

The premier of BC re-confirmed this Nov. 14, 2018: https://vancouversun.com/news/politics/b-c-premier-to-veto-closed-list-version-of-mixed-member-pro-rep

The following mock ballot correctly sums up MMP for BC:

Mock ballot of open-list Mixed Member Proportional voting system.

Here’s a swinging song to voters – click Play and then click Play again in the Facebook window (2 min. of rollicking fun):

Authorized by Committee for Voting Equity in BC (VotingBC), registered sponsor, Chair Maxwell Anderson, 3137 42 Ave W, Vancouver BC, V6N 3H1.