• Each party nominates its local candidates (as now), as well as a list of candidates for the whole province, in the order that it wants them to be elected. Before the election, parties must submit their lists, and the details of the process they used to create them, to Elections Ontario. Elections Ontario will publish this information widely, so voters will know who is on a list before they vote for a party. Voters will be able to assess whether a party created its list in a fair and transparent way. Voters will also be able to see whether a party’s list has a good balance of men and women, includes candidates from all of Ontario’s regions and reflects the “diversity” of Ontario’s population.
• Voters vote for a local candidate and for a party. The party vote determines the share of seats a party wins in the legislature.
• If a party does not have enough local members elected to match its share of the party vote, it gets a “top-up” of seats in the legislature. These seats are filled by list members elected by voters across the province through the party side of the ballot. The list seats are used to compensate for lack of proportionality in the election of local members.
• A party must have clear support – at least 3 per cent of the party vote across the province – for candidates from its list to be elected to the legislature.
Source: Citizen’s Assembly
on Electoral Reform (Ontario)
Voting systems around the world
Single Transferable Vote
Voters rank the candidates in order of preference. The candidate with the fewest votes is eliminated and the votes are transferred to the other candidates according
to preference.
Australia
Ireland
New Zealand (municipal elections)
Mixed Member Proportion
Voters cast ballots for both a local candidate and a party. The number of seats allocated to each party depends on the proportion of votes that party received in the party section. The number of constituency seats that party won is subtracted from that number and the remaining seats are allocated to the party to fill with its list. Now used in:
Germany
Israel
Italy
Japan
New Zealand
the Scottish parliament
South Africa (municipal elections)
Venezuela
First-past-the-post
The most common voting system. The candidate with the highest number of votes wins, regardless of whether or not he has the majority of votes. Now used in:
Canada
Nigeria
Singapore
South Korea
Sweden
United Kingdom
United States
“It must be said that some social conservatives see considerable value in PR, as it is a way to get issues, such as abortion and same-sex “marriage,” back on the floor of Parliament, where there is currently an all-party consensus against revisiting these matters. Since MPs under PR are to be selected according to a party list, the candidates must, of course, agree to the party’s position on controversial issues. Thus, there is no guarantee that the issues of abortion, same-sex “marriage” and euthanasia, etc. would receive any more support under PR than under the first-past-the-post system. It is, in short, a very tricky call.”
– REALITY, March/April 2007
