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The point of an election is to choose the winner. Nothing is so fixed in the minds of some first-past-the-post diehards as the idea that electoral reform is a scam for sore losers to sneak into Parliament by the back way. “Can’t win, so you want to change the rules.” And nothing drives them battier than reformers’ attacks on the “winner-take-all” nature of the current system, where only the first-place candidate in each riding is elected, however small their plurality.

“But that’s the point!” they will exclaim, exasperated, as if reformers were kindergarten teachers trying to ensure no one’s feelings are hurt at beanbag. “How can we have an election,” a columnist in the Ottawa Citizen asks, “that concludes with every voter’s will reflected in the outcome?” As to reformers’ claim that the votes cast for the losing candidates “don’t count,” as someone remarked online, it’s like saying the losing side in a 3-2 hockey game never scored.

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The sports analogies are revealing. We live in a competitive culture. We are accustomed to things having decisive, binary outcomes, where one side wins and the other side loses: not only hockey games, but court cases, legislative votes, and elections. First past the post is the only system most of us have ever known, to the point that we cannot imagine another system, governed by different assumptions.

But that is not the only possible way of looking at things. Markets are intensely competitive, and yet the nature of markets is that it isn’t only the “winners” whose tastes get represented. We don’t hold a referendum to decide whether to drink Coke or Pepsi: the minority gets to have what it wants, as much as the majority.