On Pathetic Elections
Canada had their worst-ever voter turnout at the polls last night, 59.1%. A lot of the comments that I read have people whining and complaining about Proportional Representation. Now, about 3 years ago (if I recall correctly) - we had a vote to change the electoral process to bring in Proportional Representation, whereby you would receive a ballot and rank candidates as your first, second, third choice, etc. I voted for it, because I thought that it would be a far superior system to what is currently in place, but the majority of Canada didn’t agree, and we ended up with the same, extremely biased system that we have now.
Just for kicks, I took a look at popular vote share, and broke down how many seats each party would have received based on popular vote, instead of based on majority-vote-per-riding. Here are the results:
Parliament has 308 total seats.
Seat Breakdown Based On Vote Share
- 116 Conservative
- 82 Liberal
- 32 Bloc
- 55 NDP
- 21 Green
- 2 Independent
Seat Breakdown (Actual)
- 143 Conservative
- 76 Liberal
- 50 Bloc
- 37 NDP
- 0 Green
- 2 Independent
Now, I’ll be the first to say that the “Popular Vote” breakdown doesn’t suit my vote favorably, but that’s not what I care about here. What I care about is that there is something SERIOUSLY wrong with our country when 16% (by elected seats) of our Government is formed by a party that only runs candidates in a single province (Bloc), and has no interest in the rest of Canada whatsoever. Another thing that seems pretty messed up is that a party can receive nearly 7% (Green) of the vote, and not have a single seat in the House of Commons.
icanhazfixdgovtplz? kthxbai.
