Conservatives for Fair Voting

Jason Kenney . . . in 2001

lee.drutman: I’ve written a lot about what would happen if the U.S. moved to a more proportional voting system, and I do think that would enable a center-right party to operate independent of a far-right party. It also might allow for a broader governing coalition that could keep the far-right out of government, as has happened in many Western democracies with more proportional voting systems. And maybe we see this play out a little in the U.S. That is, I could see a pro-democracy faction within the Republican Party joining with Democrats to support electoral reforms (such as the Fair Representation Act, a piece of election reform legislation that would establish multi-member districts with ranked-choice voting).

Leaders from both parties should complete work on the Fair Representation Act, which will move us toward a system of proportional representation in Congress through multi-member districts, giving voters more power to elect a broad and diverse set of representatives. Our first past the post system tends to result in two polarized parties with an inherently adversarial relationship. We need to give voters and communities the chance to explore better methods. As House Majority... Whip James Clyburn (D-SC) recently observed, proportional electoral systems are fairer and more representational because they don’t require voters, including voters of color, to have an absolute majority of votes to achieve representation. In a three-seat district, for example, any candidate with 25% of the vote is assured a seat, and even in lopsidedly partisan districts, the minority party is likely to win a seat, which also reduces the incentive for gerrymandering. To rebuild a conservative party and break free from the grip of a seditionist base, as Evan McMullin and others have suggested, you need an electoral system that will give it the oxygen needed to build party support. A center-right party competing in multi-seat districts could win seats without needing to pander to extremists or seditionists, providing conservative voters with a legitimate alternative. Opening up party competition will also mean more competition on the left. Rather than having to fight each other for control of one party, centrists and progressives can make their case directly to the voters, and be in less danger of being locked out of power entirely. Multi-member districts could introduce a more diverse set of candidates, ideas, and parties to government.

"People in Scotland consistently hold their parliament and government in higher esteem than Westminster. That’s because it offers them important things that Westminster doesn’t. Obviously Holyrood has brought government closer to the people and is focused entirely on Scottish affairs. But crucially, the Parliament much more accurately reflects political opinion in Scotland than Westminster does because it’s elected according to a more proportional voting system. People feel t...heir votes matter. Nowhere is this better illustrated than in the representation of the Scottish Conservatives. Scottish Tory voters spent nearly 20 years after 1997 feeling disenfranchised in UK General Elections, electing no more than one MP at a time in spite of averaging a 16 per cent vote share. At Holyrood by contrast Conservative voters’ interests have been represented all the way through by a sizeable and noisy group of Tory MSPs." See more

"But a closer look at the numbers again reveal the usual imbalances in the power that comes from the first-past-the-post system compared to the actual popular vote and how different things would have been under a proportional representation system. Oh, Horgan’s NDP would still have won the election, but not by a majority. The legislature will have 63.2 per cent NDP representation but only 45 per cent voted for the party."

"Many westerners abandoned any remaining hope of inclusion when Prime Minister Trudeau reneged on his 2015 campaign promise to end the existing first-past-the-post voting system prior to the 2019 election. Of course, had he revised the electoral system, he would have lost in 2019, since Scheer won the popular vote (CP 6,155,662 LP 5,915,950 votes). The electoral system allowed the Liberals to win a plurality of seats with only 33% of the vote, thereby cementing western alienation and midwifing the birth of WEXIT."

According to a throwback report by the Daily Express, in 2015, Mr Farage led calls for radical changes to the electoral system after nearly four million people voted for Ukip at the 2015 general election but saw only one MP elected. The former party leader said the first past the post system was now bust and insisted there was a growing demand for it to be scrapped. Under proportional representation Ukip could have won 83 seats, it emerged. Mr Farage said: I do think the s...ystem is bust and I do think there’ll be great demand for it to change. One party can get 50 percent of the vote in Scotland and nearly 100 percent of the seats, and our party can get four million votes and just one seat. For those reasons there are a lot of angry Ukip people out there. They’re not giving up on Ukip, but absolutely determined that we get a fairer, more reflective system. He added: But there’s something deeper about this first past the post system. What it’s led to is a General Election in which, because the system that was designed to produce majority government couldn’t do it, there was a totally negative campaign. Everybody says ‘Don’t vote for these guys, they’re slightly worse than us’. Despite the surge in the Ukip vote nationally, the only MP returned to the Commons was Douglas Carswell in Clacton, Essex. In contrast the SNP, which got less than half Ukip’s vote with 1.5million, ended up with 56 MPs out of a total of 59 in Scotland. Former deputy Ukip leader Paul Nuttall said the current system was an affront to democracy. He said: The first past the post system was designed for the 19th century and has no place in a 21st century functioning democracy. The fact a political party can poll nearly four million votes and have one seat is an affront to democracy. Electoral reform has to be put back to the front of the agenda. Mr Carswell also said the skewed system was outdated. He said: Here, in our part of Essex, people voted Ukip and they got Ukip yet across the country about five million people will have either voted for Ukip or for the Green Party. That failure to translate those five million votes into seats is less a reflection of how my party or the Green Party campaigned. Rather it tells us how dysfunctional our political system is.

"As the last point indicates, deliberative government is impossible without wide representation. Decision-making works best when it incorporates the perspectives of all significant constituencies that will be affected; government capture is the regular result when one narrow interest succeeds in dominating the decision-making process. Ensuring that government is truly representative begins with zealously protecting voting rights but hardly ends there; every aspect of the policymaking process the accessibility of the decision-making venue, the intelligibility of the subject matter, the openness to opposing views needs to be evaluated for its effect on who actually gets seats at the table."

"Without going into detail regarding Georgian party politics, it is clear that voters protested last year in order to demand promised electoral reform that would help prevent authoritarian tendencies so common in the region. This includes Russia, most of the former Soviet republics and even some EU member states. Here I include my own country Bulgaria. I believe that these amendments to Georgia’s electoral system overall represent a guarantee against authoritarianism and are less concerned with issues such as economic efficiency."

"It's been very collaborative, it's been very constructive and I think it serves New Brunswick well," says Liberal Leader Kevin Vickers. Green Leader David Coon added: "I clearly see things that have been brought to me that I've brought forward, that are being addressed. I'm seeing things that I'm proposing being taken on board, and I see results. I see all of my questions being answered honestly."