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You arrive at your neighbour’s house for a friendly game of cards, but at the door he tells you the other players have decided you will have to score twice as many points as anyone else to win the game. It’s all above board, he tells you, because most of the players voted in favour of the rule. But is this way of making the rules fair? Of course not. No one would agree to play a game on such terms. And yet this is basically the argument from those who say that B.C. cannot have a more democratic voting system without putting it to a public vote. They argue that if the public doesn’t vote on a new voting system, then it won’t be legitimate. But they are wrong, and wrong in a number of ways.

The referendum advocates seem to think that just voting on something makes it democratic. They ignore how white majorities across the American south used their voting power to disenfranchise African Americans for over a century, hardly a democratic outcome. Or how Swiss men used referendums to deny women the vote until 1972. The rules of democracy have to be fair to everyone, not just those who think they benefit from a certain set of rules. This is why the courts struck down B.C.’s electoral map in the 1980s. They said it was unfair because it treated voters unequally, over-representing some and under-representing others. Should that decision have been put to a referendum too? Obviously not.