VANCOUVER—As many B.C. residents continue to mull their options in the province’s electoral reform referendum — some one-in-five have returned their ballots, with two weeks remaining — reformers in the Interior, particularly the Kootenays, are coalescing around one option: rural-urban proportional.

Even though the rural-urban proportional (RUP) system has never been used, unlike the more common mixed-member proportional (MMP) option used in dozens of countries such as New Zealand, numerous voters in communities across the province say RUP is the method they’d trust to protect their voice in the Legislature.

“I don’t know why Nelson always draws so many pro-rep people!” said Ann Remnant, a retired recreation centre worker and “full-time volunteer” in the Kootenay town of roughly 10,000. “There was certainly an influx of draft dodgers here, so maybe people are always looking for something better and have held onto that spirit.

Article Continued Below

“But whatever the case, it attracts a certain type of person, I guess. We like discussing things, we are opinionated and possibly more open-minded. I don’t want to blow our horn too much though!”

RUP is actually a hybrid of two systems. Those are MMP and another familiar to many British Columbians who lived through the province’s two previous referenda: single transferable vote (STV). The STV— which involves a ranked ballot through which voters mark multiple candidates in order of preference — is used to elect the Australian upper house of its Parliament and the upper houses of most states.

In the proposed B.C. variant that involves a mix of STV and MMP — the so-called rural-urban proportional model — only densely populated urban and semi-urban regions would use a ranked ballot to elect their MLAs, and those urban ridings would be merged into larger regional districts. If an urban candidate gets a majority under RUP, they’re elected. But if no one passes the threshold required, then voters’ second choice votes are redistributed to ultimately pick the winner, leading ostensibly to the more broadly favoured candidate becoming MLA. Rural areas, however, would remain roughly the same size and use an MMP system to elect MLAs.

Read more:

Article Continued Below

Turnout for referendum on electoral reform more than doubles in latest stats

Click to expand

Some first-past-the-post fans bristle at push to boycott ‘fishy’ B.C. referendum question

Electoral dysfunction? Experts abroad weigh B.C. voting systems in referendum

When she cast her ballot on Wednesday, Remnant naturally voted to ditch first-past-the-post. But when it came to which proportional system to rank first — a question that has stumped proponents and opponents of reform alike — she had to think about the answer a lot.

“I picked RUP because I really like the single-transferable vote,” Remnant said. “Even though we wouldn’t get to vote using that in Nelson, being rural, it offers the most voters the most choice.

“It addresses that we have something special for urban areas, and another thing special for rural areas. There’s even a group for it on Facebook.”

One of the founders of that group confirmed that support for RUP has spiked particularly in B.C.’s Interior. And not just because of having “rural” in the name, but because people have examined it closely.

Article Continued Below

“We have quite a few members located in the interior of B.C.,” explained Vancouver resident Kelsey Hannan, who co-founded the Facebook group Vote Rural-Urban Proportional BC, which has since registered with Elections B.C. “(It) slowly grew and grew and grew as more people came to like Rural-Urban Proportional.”

It’s not just in the Kootenays it’s gaining steam, however, nor solely among progressive voters. In Kamloops, longtime B.C. Conservative Party activist and blogger Alan Forseth said he voted to keep first-past-the-post, but on the second question only selected RUP and said the model has strong merits.

“RUP gives you a ranked ballot in urban and semi-urban areas, and I like the ranked ballot,” he explained. “It gives me the option of voting for someone who I think would make a good representative but may not be my first choice — rather than voting for one candidate and saying the rest don’t matter.

“It would give the option of going down the list of people who are most closely aligned to where your beliefs are. I’ve voted in past for people who didn’t have a hope in Hell of winning, but I agreed they had a good point. If I had a ranked ballot it would have made it a better exercise.”

For him, however, the most attractive thing about RUP is ensuring that each region has the diversity of its political opinions represented in Victoria, without losing the voice of locals in the Legislature in order to match a provincewide popular vote that might not be locally acceptable.

“I don’t want to see the smaller rural ridings lose any impact at all,” he said. They’ve lost enough as it is now, I don’t want to make it even worse for them.

“I didn’t want to terribly increase the size of ridings, and I want to protect the larger, less populated ridings, but I’d also like to see a distinct winner. That’s what threw me into rural urban.”

In fact, recently polls suggest that the RUP voting option is gaining support. In an Angus Reid survey in September, roughly one in four respondents favoured it among proportional options. Last week, an Insights West survey suggested it had exceeded four-in-10 support — gaining on those who favour the mixed-member proportional option that is used in New Zealand.

The Nov. 9 survey of 814 British Columbians found “a dead heat” between keeping the current voting system versus replacing it with a proportional one, although 17 per cent said they were “unsure of which system B.C. should use.” The survey had a 3.4 per cent margin of error.

Remnant and others in the local Nelson 4 PR group (affiliated with FairVote Canada in B.C.) have held frequent proponent tables at local farmers markets, the popular co-op grocery story, and public events not only in Nelson but surrounding small towns.

Another Nelson resident supporting RUP is retired international development worker Marty Horswill, who supports it because it’s closest to the STV model chosen by the Citizens’ Assembly on Electoral Reform more than a decade ago.

“All of them are miles ahead of what we have currently,” he said, “but one system was selected by that randomly selected group of British Columbians who thought it was the best for our province.

“It is the one that has less influence by political party bosses, and more say to voters to who actually gets into the Legislature, while still being proportional. RUP is miles ahead of the other options.”

Nearly one in five registered voters in British Columbia have returned their ballot packages in the province’s electoral reform referendum so far, according to Elections BC on Friday. That’s more than twice the number of ballots the independent agency reported the day previous.

On Thursday, Elections BC reported it had received ballots from 7.4 per cent of registered voters. the agency previously only included ballots that had already passed a screening process to verify voter information. But it decided Friday to release the total number of ballots — 18 per cent — it had received so far, including those that had not been screened yet.

In the two previous mail-in ballots — the Harmonized Sales Tax and the transportation plebiscite — far fewer people had voted after the same number of ballot-receiving days (7 per cent and and 3.2 per cent of voters respectively).

In this StarMetro chart, the returned ballot turnout (as a percentage of registered voters) is shown day-by-day so far in the 2018 electoral reform referendum in red — compared against the 2011 Harmonized Sales Tax (HST) referendum and transportation plebiscite. The double-red bar is the total ballots received but not yet processed. (David P. Ball/StarMetro)

Having two entirely different types of ballot and counting in a single province might seem unwieldy, but it is the case in a number of jurisdictions, including Bavaria, according to political scientists.

Not everyone likes the idea. In the Legislature on Oct. 16, Prince George-Valemount MLA Shirley Bond warned that her riding and others like it would see their voice diminished if they changed systems.

“I represent a riding not nearly as large as some members in this House, but my riding is currently the size of Belgium,” she said. “Once our voters have chosen their MLA, we serve our constituents — not our supporters or our members but our constituents, our citizens, our residents … I work hard to represent all of my constituents.

“Yet the best we get to offer them are three models, none of which most people can explain, all of which shift some degree of authority to (parties) to choose their MLAs, and two of which have never been tried in the world before.”

She urged people to vote for first-past-the-post, not rural-urban because a big unknown at the moment is which ridings are urban and which ridings are rural.

“Maybe this doesn’t matter if you don’t live in rural B.C. It matters to me,” she said. “There’s a model called rural-urban. I would challenge anyone in this Legislature to describe for me whether Prince George, Valemount and McBride are rural or urban. How are they going to choose when they don’t even know how they fit in that model?”

But one of her constituents, Peter Ewart, a retired college instructor in Prince George, B.C., with the Stand Up for the North Committee, thinks all the pro-rep options would better represent his riding, but prefers RUP, too.

“There’s a tendency for more and more decisions to be made farther and father away, whether in Victoria, Ottawa and overseas,” he said. “In our region, it’s very important our voices are heard.

“I would pick any one of them better than first-past-the-post system. In my opinion it has worked against rural and northern parts of the province, where parties basically write off entire areas and don’t even bother to campaign there. Other parties dominate and take us for granted. Under pro rep we’d be pretty much guaranteed of always having a mix of government and opposition MLAs representing you.”

For Nelson’s Horswill, regardless of how people vote they should get their ballot in to have their say. On that front, he’d agree with those across the political spectrum, whether Bond or Forseth.

“I sent mine in a long time ago, almost within a day or two, because I didn’t want to get so involved in promoting the referendum that I forget to vote myself,” he said. “But everybody’s saying the same thing: please, you’ve got a ballot, mail it in.”

Referendum voting packages must be received by Elections B.C. before 4:30 p.m. on Nov. 30, either by mail or in-person at Service B.C. centres.