After the votes were counted it has been revealed that, once again, the winning party has won a majority government despite only winning a plurality of the votes.
The Ontario Conservative Party won around 75 seats by capturing 40 percent of the votes cast last night.
This has triggered the usual calls for changing the voting system, with the most popular call being for some sort of Proportional Representation (PR). The proponents of PR like to believe and would like you to believe that it is the "most democratic" method of electing governments. I disagree as I have written here and here.
In addition to the issues I outline in the two posts I linked to there is another major flaw in PR.
In Canada we do not elect parties or leaders. Certainly the leader and their political party take a prominent role during election campaigns but when I went to vote last night, in the riding of Ottawa West-Nepean, Doug Ford, Kathleen Wynne and Andrea Horvath were not on the ballot paper handed to me. Instead it was the names of my local candidates. If the local candidate that won last night turns out to be incompetent, a crook or a pedofile I will have the opportunity to kick his ass to the curb during the next election.
The same is not true in election done by PR. In most cases, when the votes are counted, the people chosen to become elected officials are chosen from party lists. That is, they never actually faced the electorate. Further depending on their stature in the party they may never have to face any electoral consequences even if they are incompetent, crooks or pedofiles. If they do not have to face the electorate directly then they can never be voted out. This is how Silvo Berlusconi managed to stay on as Prime Minister of Italy for so long despite the fact most Italians thought he was a crook. He never had to directly face voters. His party won enough of the votes to get the first crack at forming government and he was the leader of that party. His coalition partners always put the opportunity to have power ahead of any principle.
Some would argue that his party would face those consequences but that is not backed up by evidence. In a PR system a party losing an election, even by a large margin, is not always an inhibiting factor in the ability of that party to attain power or for an unpopular politician to stick around and continue to exercise power even if the majority of the electorate want them gone.
Look at the Ontario election. The Conservatives won 40 percent of the popular vote, the NDP 34 and the Liberals 19. In a PR system none of the parties would have the ability to form a government without help from one of the other parties. Unless, the Conservatives and the NDP were to decide on forming a grand coalition the most likely outcome would be either a Conservative or an NDP coalition government with the Liberals as the junior coalition partner. So in other words, despite the fact that Kathleen Wynne was personally unpopular with the Ontario electorate, her party would still be part of the government and she could conceivably hang onto the party leadership or at least hang on as a Member of the Provincial Parliament.
Incidentally, in the PR system coalitions become the norm. The partners in the coalition divide up the cabinet posts and political patronage positions between them. The dominent party takes most or all of the really important posts but the junior partner takes some significant post and exercises extensive influence on the decisions of the governing coalition.
Proponents of PR point to Mixed Member Proportional Representation (MMP) as a solution to this problem. In MMP some political candidates face the voters directly as they do with the current system of voting. Unfortunately, this method will not elect the number of legislators equal to the popular vote. All parties would experience a shortfall of the number of elected members. As a result once all of the votes are counted and the popular vote is known the number of elected members is filled out to match the popular vote using party lists, creating the same problems as I indicated above.
The-First-Past-the-post voting system is not perfect. It certainly has some flaws, including some serious one. However, Proportional Representation voting systems have their own very serious flaws. Comparing the two it is a wash. Neither is perfect and neither is the "most democratic" method of choosing a government. If it were used last night the Conservatives would still be forming the government but the Liberals would probably be joining them despite the fact that 81% of the electorate did not want them to be anywhere near the levers of power in the province.
The current system has prevented just that. So although, 60 percent of the electorate did not want a Conservative government, 66% did not want an NDP government and 81% did not want a Liberal government. It did not do it perfectly but the current voting system did allow the electorate of Ontario to express their desires and achieve the electoral result that they wanted.
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