There is something unique about a Canadian city the day of an election. Unlike a World Cup match or critical hockey game, what's often striking is how normal the city seems; the masses of media that pervade party galas, to employ a cliched but useful expression, stand in stark contrast to the everyday atmosphere that pervades the rest of the city. This isn't, of course, a necessarily negative thing. Democracy can be seen, to crudely paraphrase Ernest Renan, as a daily plebiscite - we give our consent to the system daily so that election day becomes something of a routine, another ...

In Spacing Votes' first piece on disproportionality, we looked at how the presence of the 90 local ridings can affect whether a party gets a percentage of seats in the legislature smaller or larger than their popular support merits. In this post, we'll consider how the discarding of votes for parties that don't meet the 3% threshold inflates the percentage of seats in the legislature that the remaining parties receive. For a closer look at the mathematics that produce this, check out the exploration of the Hare formula in Part 2 of Spacing's MMP Primer. Recall that under MMP parties that receive less than 3% of the vote do not qualify for any of the list seats, a mechanism designed to prevent extremist parties and the negatives of proportional representation seen in countries like Italy and Israel. When making calculations about seat distribution, all of the votes cast for parties that did not meet the 3% threshold are discarded. A party's share of the seats in the legislature -- the percentage they deserve based on their popular support -- is thus calculated not out of the total number of votes, but out of the votes that have been cast for parties meeting or above the 3% threshold. If, for example, 4% of the votes are discarded, then the "new" party vote becomes 96% of voters, rather than 100%. This means that the seat numbers for the remaining parties can become inflated. The more small party votes that are discarded, the greater the percentage of seats in the legislature that the remaining parties receive, and the more likely it is that "extra" seats would be given to those parties.

The Green Party of Ontario, supporters of MMP, announced late last week at Queen's Park how they would choose the 39 individuals that would compose their party list should the MMP referendum be successful. The Green Party's list will feature gender parity -- the first five members of the list will be the opposite gender of the previous member. "At the top of the list will be the leader, and then the two deputy leaders," said Green Party leader Frank de Jong. "The second person on the list will be the opposite gender of the leader. And ...

In the National Post last weekend, Andrew Coyne provided a compelling argument for MMP that would please anyone bored and unstimulated by the past weeks of campaigning. Considering the worst points of our current system, he states: Victory or defeat can turn on the swing of one or two percentage points... the consequences of losing a few points makes [the parties] excessively, almost neurotically cautious, unwilling to take the slightest risk or advocate the mildest change, but each hugging as close as it can to the median voter, the status quo and each other. Hence the ...

If you follow the literature and discussion on MMP, you'll notice that the words "roughly" and "approximate" are used quite often. You might hear how a party's share of seats would be "roughly equal" to its share of the party vote. There are a number of reasons for the frequent appearance of these adjectives, some of them small, mathematical and relatively insignificant. You have for instance, the rounding up of decimal points and the imprecise distribution of remainders of seats -- not exact mechanisms, but likely not severe enough to wildly throw off election results. There are however, two key aspects of MMP that could and likely will affect election results, producing what is called "disproportionality," where a party receives more or less seats than their popular support merits, an obviously undesirable state under a system designed to achieve the opposite. The first is the presence of 90 first-past-the-post local ridings. While keeping local seats is meant to preserve local representation and ensure continuity with Ontario's electoral tradition, first-past-the-post local ridings are inherently disproportional -- they still allow for parties to receive a greater or lesser number of seats than their popular support merits, and for majority governments to be formed by parties with less than 50% of the party vote. Take a look at this scenario drawn up by the Citizen's Assembly: Party A has won 55 local seats, 42.64% of the vote, while winning only 39.14% of the party vote. They end up receiving 3 more seats than their popular support merits, while the other parties end up getting a smaller percentage of the seats in the legislature than they deserve. These extra seats are called "overhang" seats. While this is a clearly disproportional result, Party A wouldn't lose any of those extra seats, regardless of how slim their margin of victory might have been. The MMP systems in Germany and New Zealand compensate for the disproportionality produced by the local ridings by temporarily expanding the legislature to ensure that the results are proportional. Parties that receive more seats than their popular support merits would keep them, but the other parties would receive extra seats to ensure that they have a proportional number. The Citizen's Assembly chose not to include this feature in the recommended system, although it's not inconceivable that it could be included in the final legislation if the referendum is successful.

This Friday, September 28th at 7pm the Queen's University Centre for the Study of Democracy will host a large event on MMP at the MaRS Centre at 101 College Street in Toronto. Speaking in favour of MMP will be National Post columnist Andrew Coyne and former Ontario minister Marilyn Churley. Speaking against MMP will be Toronto Sun columnist Christina Blizzard and former Ontario minister Charles Harnick. photo by Daryl Fritz 

Tonight's leadership debate will provide both an important and arguably inappropriate forum for a discussion of MMP. On one hand, referendums are one of the few times in our system when the opinions of party leaders are on par with everyone else. Their opinions, despite their enhanced presence in the public eye, are really of no greater relevance; the decision falls to the citizenry as a whole. This is direct democracy making its infrequent appearance into our tradition of representation - party leaders should step aside and let citizens dictate their collective future. At the same time, the ...

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oVO_umCQNaA[/youtube] Rick Anderson, Committee Chair of Vote for MMP (and former Liberal and Reform party strategist), makes his case for MMP on CBC Newsworld. The Ottawa Citizen published an excellent article on the financial and organizational disparity between the Yes and No sides of the MMP debate: Without exception, the pro-MMP forces are larger, wealthier and better organized than the sole anti-MMP group. They have more volunteers, more campaign literature and a larger presence on the web. The Vote for MMP campaign has between 500 and 1,000 volunteers, has launched a sophisticated website that links to 45 supportive blogs and has raised ...

While the discussion of MMP has only slowly started working its way through the body politic, there are a tremendous number of MMP resources on the web. Here is a list of all of the major sites, plus a few lesser-known resources. Add any other sites in the comments, and I'll post them here. Elections Ontario The official referendum site features an interesting, if repetitive, interactive video on the referendum choices, and an FAQ. Citizens' Assembly Material The final report of the Citizens' Assembly [PDF] is a nice introductory document that provides some simple projections ...

The second part of Spacing’s MMP Primer examines the mechanics and formulas that are used to provide parties with a number of seats in the legislature roughly proportional to their popular support (for some background on MMP and the terms used here, please see Spacing's MMP Primer Part 1). The distribution of seats under MMP involves the use of the superficially intimidating but relatively simple Hare Formula [ Votes (V)/Seats (S) = Quota (Q) ], which is used to calculate how many party votes a party must receive in order to get one of the 39 party seats. On election night, at the same times as the votes in all 90 local ridings are being counted, Elections Ontario counts all of the party votes. The local votes and the party votes are kept separate; they do not affect each other. Recall that parties need at least 3% of the party vote to get any of the 39 seats. After determining the number of votes each party has received, all of the votes cast for parties that received less than 3% of the party vote are subtracted from the vote total. For example, imagine if 100,000 total votes were cast and a party received 2,000 votes (2%), under the 3% threshold. Those 2,000 votes would be removed from the calculations, leaving the relevant number of total votes at 98,000. The same process would be applied to all other votes cast for parties receiving less than 3%. A party's share of the party vote will thus increase once the votes for parties below the threshold are discarded. The greater the number of discarded smaller party votes, the greater the remaining parties' share of the vote will be. In the above example, if a party has 30,000 votes (30% of the party vote) and the number of total votes is reduced to 98,000, their share rises to 30.61%. We’ll further explore the “disproportionality” and potential extra seats produced by this mechanism in the next MMP Primer post. Once the small party votes have been subtracted and the final vote total reached, the calculations are relatively simple. All of the remaining votes (V) are divided by the total number of seats in the legislature (129), producing the number of votes one seat is worth. For example, if there were four million remaining votes, then one seat (4 million/129) would be worth 31008 votes. This number is the quota (Q), and is used to determine how many (if any) extra seats a party should receive.