On Thursday, Ontario went to the polls and elected a Progressive Conservative majority government led by Doug Ford. The New Democrats will become the official opposition, representing their best result in nearly 30 years, while the Liberals have failed to reach the eight seats needed to be recognised as an official party in the legislature. Green Party leader Mike Schreiner also made history for his party as its first elected MPP in the province.
Of course, many who don’t support the PCs will be attributing the new government to the First Past The Post system used in the province, and will use it to argue that an alternative voting system should be used. But would a different system really have produced a different result?
Let us examine three alternatives used elsewhere around the world: Alternative Vote (AV), Single Transferable Vote (STV), and the d’Hondt method of Proportional Representation (PR).
Alternative Vote
Under the AV system, voters do not select a single candidate on their ballot paper, but rank the candidates instead. Votes are then counted in multiple stages. On each stage, each vote counts for the most preferred candidate of those remaining, and the candidate with the fewest votes is eliminated. Once a candidate surpasses 50% of the vote, that candidate wins the seat. Read more on Wikipedia
Main Street Research conducted a poll on June 3–4 where voters were asked for both their first and second choices. It shows that over half of Liberal voters would likely preference the NDP, while NDP voters’ preferences are slightly more spread out. Over half of PC voters wouldn’t even provide a second preference.
This would be enough for 16 seats to change hands on switching to AV, with the Liberals gaining one from the PCs and losing another one to the NDP. The other 14 would all go from the PCs to the NDP, which would be enough to change the overall result from an overall majority to a minority legislature. However, given the margin of error with how I’m distributing preference votes, it is possible that the PCs could still have finished with an overall majority. If we were using this system, we would need to wait for several days for Elections Ontario to certify the results before knowing for sure whether it would be a majority or not.
Single Transferable Vote
STV is an extension of AV which works in multi-seat ridings. A candidate will be aiming to reach a quota of votes (for a 4-seat riding, this quota will be 20%+1), with any excess votes distributed among the voters’ next preferences. The expectation is that a roughly proportional seat distribution will occur within each riding, though as we’re about to see, preferences can throw this proportionality off. Read more on Wikipedia
For this exercise, I’ve created 32 STV ridings, each of which is made up between three and five of the current single-seat ridings. Fascinatingly, with these ridings, and using the same preferences as for AV earlier, the PCs and the NDP finish with the same number of seats. How did that happen?
In an STV system, especially in a multi-party system as Ontario has, the final seat is almost always influenced significantly by preferences. In the five-seat Hamilton riding, for example, the NDP only got around 60% more of the primary vote than the PCs, yet won 3 times as many seats. Here, when the final Green candidate was eliminated (2 NDP and 1 PC seats had been awarded by this point), the first Liberal and second PC were neck and neck. The fact that the Greens were more likely to preference the Liberals was enough to block the PCs from getting a second seat.
Proportional Representation
There are a number of different flavours of Proportional Representation. Personally, I am partial of the d’Hondt Method, which is used for many legislatures around the world. I’ve also excluded any parties that received less than 1% of the vote.
As the PCs received the most votes, they would get the most seats. But they would remain well short of what they would need for a majority government, and as with AV, Kathleen Wynne would face significant pressure to allow an NDP government to be formed rather than a PC government.
Under the systems considered here, the only one in which the PCs won an overall majority is First Past The Post. One system puts the PCs very near the boundary between majority and minority, meaning several days of waiting for official results before knowing what next steps would be. The other two systems examined here would have resulted in a clear minority legislature, and we would now be seeing the party leaders negotiating with each other to determine who would become Ontario’s next Premier.
