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Most important, all three would deliver a legislature that looked a lot more like what people actually voted for, ridding B.C. of the harmful inequities of first past the post: its tendency to rule by the minority, fewer than 40 per cent of the votes commonly being enough to claim a “majority;” the vast disparities in the weight it assigns to different votes, measured by how many votes it takes to elect a representative of each party, depending on how “efficiently” its vote is distributed; the pressure it puts on voters to vote “strategically,” i.e. for a party other than the one they prefer, for fear of “splitting” or “wasting” their vote; and so on.

Photo by Dirk Meissner/The Canadian Press

What are the three systems? The first, and least-known, is called dual-member proportional (DMP). Voters would elect two members in each ridings. One would be elected directly by the current method. The second would be allocated based on each party’s share of the provincial popular vote: if a party were entitled to, say, 10 seats on this basis, they would be drawn from the 10 ridings where it did best in the popular vote.

The second, in use in Germany and New Zealand, is called mixed-member proportional (MMP). Again, some members, at least 60 per cent, would be elected as they are now, in single-member constituencies. The remainder would be elected from lists of candidates representing the parties in each region of the province, based on the parties’ share of the vote in that region. Here is where the details matter. Many people dislike party lists, fearing these leave the parties to decide which candidates are elected from them. That’s certainly one possibility. But against such “closed” lists, where voters simply indicate their choice of party, are “open” lists, where voters choose the candidates directly. It is unfortunate that this question has not been settled — though even closed lists would not differ all that much from the status quo, where candidates in a riding are often hand-picked by the party leader.