Posted at 1:00 p.m.
Jean-Pierre Charbonneau and four other representatives of the New Democracy Movement recently signed a letter in these pages questioning an editorial by The Press supporting the preferential voting system1. According to them, this solution would not address the fundamental problem of distorted electoral results produced by our old first-past-the-post system. It would therefore not produce results that are sufficiently representative of the diversity of opinions present in the population. And these situations of distortion in the electoral results, the editorial agreed, can only increase over time with the presence of a greater number of competitive political parties whose effect is to favor the election of majority governments. with barely 37% of the vote.
To support their criticism of the preferential voting system, the signatories used the results of an election held in Australia last May. Since this country is one of the few to use the preferential voting system in general elections, it is all the more relevant to understand how it works and its political impact. However, it turns out that, according to the authors, this election would have led to significant electoral distortions that have nothing to envy to those we have experienced in Quebec and Canada in recent decades. The discrepancy observed between the number of votes obtained by the major political parties and their number of deputies would constitute “a striking demonstration” that the preferential voting system would in no way protect against the possibility of serious electoral distortions. If so, their demonstration is sorely lacking.
Indeed, this is based solely on taking into account the first-choice votes (first preference vote) of Australian voters. The second or third choice votes, for example, which nevertheless constitute the characteristic of a preferential voting system to designate the winners of an election, have been ignored by the authors. This rather gross error falsifies their portrait and invalidates it. Does this mean that any electoral distortion is impossible under a preferential voting system? We can never draw this general conclusion since this approach does not eliminate the political inequalities between citizens of more or less populous constituencies as well as those linked to the excessive concentration of political preferences in constituencies, two factors responsible for significant electoral distortions. in Quebec, in Canada and perhaps also, I don’t know, in Australia. To attack these factors of inequalities, I would like to underline it, the proportional vote is more effective, although it poses a certain number of other surmountable difficulties, it is true, if it is correctly moderated. Preferential voting, on the other hand, is much simpler for us to set up since it does not entail any modification to the current constituencies.
So we shouldn’t be shy about continuing to support the preferential voting system and considering it a significant improvement over the current situation, which it is.
We must also remember that it is already widely used by our political parties when the time comes to designate their leader. So why deny citizens this simple right to indicate an order to their preferences on a ballot paper if they so wish in order to enable them to save, perhaps, a strategic vote in favor of a sincere vote? Our politicians will only be more representative, especially since they will have, in return, to obtain this time a real absolute majority of votes to be elected.
The fundamental virtue of a good voting system, especially in our time when populism is wreaking havoc in some countries, is to put our elected officials in a position where they will always have to take into account the greatest number of voters in their actions. . The voting system must therefore encourage them to avoid polarizing the electorate unnecessarily, to be moderate in their remarks, particularly with regard to their adversaries, and to emphasize more what brings them together than what distances them. This is how they will increase their chances of getting their supporters’ second and third choices in a future election. This is also how they can more easily build alliances with other political parties if necessary, when the time comes. Both a preferential voting system and a moderate proportional voting system bring us closer to this goal of more inclusive representation, but by different means and with different consequences, I agree. This is why they both deserve to be further supported and documented without complacency or unbridled passion. This is all the more true since nothing indicates, as is unfortunately often reported in these debates, that the two propositions are mutually exclusive.
When will there be a real citizens’ assembly free from any external influence that will be able to study these questions and make its recommendations to the population, and not to the government in place?