Voting System Options

Since we don't use proportional voting here in Canada, people aren't necessarily very familiar with it. When they first hear about it, they sometimes assume it’s a new idea or something untested. The reality is almost completely the opposite — Canada is really an outlier by not using it.

Of the world’s established democracies, roughly two-thirds use some form of proportional voting to elect their national governments. This isn’t an recent trend — most of these systems have been in place, and delivering solid results, for decades. We just don't hear about them very much.

How proportional voting works & key options

The real question is "which don't?" Ireland. Sweden. Norway. Denmark. Finland. Germany. New Zealand. The Netherlands. Austria. And many others. These are stable, prosperous, well-governed democracies — and they all use proportional systems.

They’re not experimenting. They’re not out of the mainstream. They made this change — in many cases generations ago — and they haven’t looked back.

All more inclusive or proportional systems share one core insight: since a single representative per riding can't represent the political views of all the voters there, we instead have to elect several representatives together from each region of the province or country.

When several seats are available in a region, almost all voters get to elect someone they actually support, and the overall result closely reflects how people actually voted.

Read on to learn about the main ways this is typically done.

Preferred by BC Citizens' Assembly: The Single Transferable Vote (STV) was the choice of the BC Citizens' Assembly on Electoral Reform in 2004 because, in their view, it did the best job of reflecting the priorities of voters.

Multi-Member Districts: Used in Ireland and Scotland, STV uses multi-member electoral districts instead of single-member ridings. In Canada's context, we'd likely group together several current ridings (probably about four, on average) and elect a group of MPs or MLAs to collectively represent the combined electoral district.

Ranked-Choice Ballot: On the ballot, you vote for individual candidates — not just parties. You rank them in order of your preference: 1, 2, 3, and so on. You can rank candidates from the same party, or mix and rank across party lines — your ballot, your choice.

Counting Process: When counting the ballots, candidates who receive a seat's worth of votes are elected. If your first choice has more votes than they need, the extra support flows to your next choice. If your first choice doesn’t have enough support, your vote goes ("transfers") to your next choice. Either way, your vote works to help elect a candidate you prefer.

Proportional Result: The result is that the set of MPs or MLAs elected in a district accurately reflect the range of political views there — and you always know exactly which person you helped elect.

List PR is the most widely used proportional voting system in the world. In western countries, it is most strongly associated with Scandinavia, the Netherlands and Belgium.

Multi-Member Districts: As with STV, List PR elects more than one member from each electoral districts. Districts can vary widely in size — from as few as 4 or 5 in Austria or Spain, to an average of roughly a dozen in Finland, Denmark and Belgium, to a high of 150 in the Netherlands and Slovakia. If adopted in Canada, we would likely aim for districts with about 4-5 seats on average.

Ballot Design: Typically, each party presents a list of candidates in each region, and voters are asked to select one of the lists. In many countries — Sweden, Finland, the Netherlands, among others — voters can choose specific candidates from within a party list, not just the party itself. These “open list” systems mean voters can influence who gets elected, rather than accepting the party's preferred ordering, though the details depend on the system. In Canada, we would likely value prioritizing voters' choices.

Counting Process: Within each district, the number of votes are counted by party. Each party is then awarded a number of seats in proportion to the number of votes they received. Parties who receive less than a "threshold" amount (typically 3-5% of the vote) are not awarded any seats.

Top-Up Seats: Some countries such as Norway or Sweden also add a small number of compensatory seats — sometimes called adjustment or leveling seats — to make sure the overall result stays proportional even if regional results don’t quite line up. This is a well-established, straightforward approach to making the results align as closely as possible with the voters' intentions.

This is a "designed-for-Canada" approach that combines the multi-member districts of STV or List PR with a small top-up, or compensatory, tier. It was developed by Byron Weber-Becker (University of Waterloo) and Antony Hodgson (Fair Voting BC) at the request of the federal Electoral Reform Commission in 2016 to address certain questions the committee had (such as whether a new system would require boundary changes — spoiler alert: they don't).

Multi-Member Districts: As with STV or List PR, we'd likely use multi-member districts of moderate size — likely averaging about four members. These would be grouped into regions of 12-20 seats, with 1-2 top-up seats added (~10% of all seats).

Ballot Design: The ballots would typically be identical to either those used with STV or Open List PR — voters would either rank or indicate their preferred choice.

Counting : Counting would proceed in each electoral district the same way as under STV or Open List PR. In addition, we would total each party's vote share across the region and determine what their fair share of seats would be (counting the top-up seat(s)). The most under-represented parties would be awarded the top-up seats, and they would go to the candidate(s) from those parties who had received the greatest number of votes, but were not elected in their local regions.

Proportional Result: As with STV and Open List PR, the set of MPs or MLAs elected in a district would accurately reflect the range of political views there, and the small number of top-up seats would reduce the barriers to voters with minority political views electing an MP or MLA who shared their views and would ensure that the overall seat totals accurately reflected the regional results.

Recommendations: Mixed Member Proportional (MMP) is frequently advocated for in Canada. It was recommended by the Law Commission (2004) and the Ontario Citizens' Assembly (2007), and was on the ballot for the 2016 plebiscite in PEI and the 2018 referendum in BC.

SMDs + Top-Ups: Used in Germany and New Zealand, MMP splits the seats into two tiers: about 60% of the seats would be in single-member ridings and MPs or MLAs would be elected using FPTP, while the balance would be in a "top-up" tier that would compensate for the disproportionality expected in the single-member seats. Each party would submit a list of candidates who would be eligible to be elected in the top-up seats.

Ballot Design: Voters would vote for the candidates in the single-member ridings the same way we do now with FPTP. Optionally, voters are given a second ballot where they can vote for their preferred party (Bavaria allows voters to vote for an individual candidate from the regional list).

Counting the Ballots: The single-member results are calculated the same as FPTP, while the winners of the top-up seats are determined the same way as with List PR — each party's vote share is calculated (based on the first ballot if a single-ballot system is being used, or from the second ballot otherwise), and a proportional number of seats awarded to each party. The number of single-member seats is subtracted from the proportional totals to determine the number of top-up seats awarded to each party. These seats are then filled in the order shown on the ballot (unless the Bavarian system is being used, in which case the candidate(s) with the most individual votes are elected).

Fair Vote Canada has prepared a number of useful tutorials on various voting systems. Check them out below:

Proportional voting is proven. Now it's our turn to get on board.

The benefits of proportional voting aren’t theoretical — the evidence is sitting right there in the election results of dozens of countries. Proportional voting works, it’s stable, and it makes democracy more representative.