Voters in British Columbia, when asked on a 2005 ballot whether they supported switching to a Single Transferable Vote (STV) system like the one used in the USG’s U-Council elections, chose not to make the switch.
Though 57.7 ...(back to the article)
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Bobbo: I think they must have counted the votes differently last year. Maybe it was just that the people with the most votes got elected instead of STV.
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Re: Wilf Day's comment - I agree that we should have been able to rank more than two candidates. But isn't that what happened last year? If so, then why was that year's election wrong?
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In the recent USG elections students were allowed to rank only two candidates? That's weird. No STV voting system in actual use anywhere has such a restriction. It's used in national and local elections in Ireland and Northern Ireland, Senate elections in Australia, provincial elections in Tasmania and the Australian Capital Territory, local elections in Scotland, some local elections in New Zealand, and local elections in Cambridge Massachusetts, the only remaining city in the USA that still uses STV. They all let voters rank the full list if they want to. Tasmania even requires voters to rank at least five.
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I'm not sure how we can say that "Voters in British Columbia, ... chose not to make the switch." When almost 58% vote for a new system, that is a pretty clear call for change. The 60% threshold was an arbitrary restriction applied by the government to ensure that the proposal would fail.
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"For each vote that a candidate received beyond the five-vote quota, one randomly selected person who had voted for that candidate was allowed to vote again"....random or pseudo-random? :)
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Could someone just put this chick in charge of elections? At least she seems to have some idea how the hell it works, which is more than I can say for anyone on the USG.
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