Paint it True

"Paint it True, paint it true - to miss or mister
if you don't we wont get the picture
lies and deception is a terrible mixture
when you speak from the heart it'll uplift ya"¹

So I've been trying to avoid writing too many dissections of media articles since that seems to lack a certain style or originality but, to tell the truth, part of my motivation for blogging in the first place was to no longer bottle up the irritation I feel when I encounter the worst of the media so let's have at it...

Tommy Steele, (from Canadian Steele) has a good post up on what it means to be non-partisan. All I'll add right now is that to me non-partisan means a) what Tommy said and b) the opposite of an article in the Tyee today by Mitchell Anderson, entitled 'Let's Keep Vote Reform Alive'.

The article is a pro-MMP piece which attempts to show that the 'message' sent by the referendum was that the people of B.C. want to see an MMP system brought in. Which is fair enough for an objective, it's just the implementation that went awry. Let's do a line by line critique...

"The referendum question on BC-STV needed 60 percent support to succeed. It got 57 percent.

There are two lessons that we should take from this result. The first is that BC-STV is a dud. A poll by Ipsos-Reid in late April showed that 64 percent of British Columbians knew "nothing" or "very little" about BC-STV. A second poll by Nordic Research Group poll on the eve of the referendum showed that only 37 percent of respondents could even name STV."

So here's my question, how can the reason that (43% of) people voted against STV be because it is a dud if they couldn't even name the system being voted on? How could people be expected to prefer MMP, if they're not going to bother to even learn the name of what they are voting on? Will people be more likely to learn the acronym MMP than the acronym STV because the system which the MMP acronym corresponds to is a little bit simpler than the one which STV corresponds to?

If people don't even know the name of the proposed system, that doesn't indicate that it's a dud, it indicates the people are a dud because they have no interest in how they are governed and/or that the process for educating people was a dud. It says nothing about MMP being better than STV (or vice-versa).

"British Columbians were voting for change. They were not voting for BC-STV."

It's nice that the author believes he knows the motivations of all the people of B.C. who voted, but I for one voted for STV and I think a lot of other people did as well. It seems like pretty hard spin to suggest that people who answered 'yes' to a question, 'do you want to adopt STV as the new electoral system' weren't voting for STV. Maybe not all of them, but enough to make the 57-43 split in favour? definitely.

"While BC-STV has now failed, electoral reform continues to move forward. Just one day after the election, both Gordon Campbell and Carole James have stated that improving the voting system is a priority that should be revisited before the next election.

This is stunning rebuke to the cynical argument made prior to May 17th that while voters might not like or even understand BC-STV, they had better vote for it or electoral reform in BC will be set back for years."

And I guess if Campbell comes out tomorrow and says the Liberals want to help out the poor, that will be a stunning rebuke to those who said that voting NDP would be better for the poor than voting Liberal. When it comes to politics, action speaks a lot louder than words. If we end up getting a new electoral system some time in the next, say 6 years, *that* will be a rebuke to those who thought a 'No' vote would set back electoral reform. And besides, the only reason electoral reform still has the momentum it does is because so many people voted 'Yes'.

Furthermore, I would challenge the author to point out where 'Yes' supporters are on the record as saying that people who don't understand STV should vote 'Yes'. It was the 'Yes' side which did by far the lion's share of the work to get people to know about and understand STV. The 'No' side seemed reasonably content to rely on simplistic (and often misleading) fear-mongering rather than try and educate people.

"Carole James has also revealed that she does not favour STV -- a sentiment shared in the vast majority of the public submissions of the now defunct Citizens Assembly.

In fact, fully 80 percent of the public submissions to the Citizens Assembly process were in favour of some form of "mixed-member proportional" (MMP) system, used in some variety by most established democracies around the world. Unlike STV, MMP has a solid record of delivering proportional results and achieving gender equity of elected officials."

This is the real heart of where the article goes awry. First off, as is well known by now, the Green Party stacked the submissions to the Assembly, by lining up speaker after speaker to support MMP without any other system having such organized support behind it. So the quoting of statistics which the author must surely (by now) know to be misleading is quite disingenuous.

Speaking of which, the statement that MMP is used in some variety by most established democracies around the world is simply a falsehood. As far as I know, out of the 30 or so countries which make up the OECD (a group of the world's wealthiest / most advanced nations) only Germany, New Zealand, Mexico, the U.K. (for some regional elections) and Italy (lower house) use MMP. That's hardly *most*. In fact, it's only 2 more than use STV (Ireland, Australia (upper house), and U.K. (again regional elections). And maybe this would be a good time to mention that New Zealand is only using MMP because it won a referendum - with a 54% yes vote, 3% less than voted for STV in B.C.

But even worse is the statement that 'unlike STV, MMP has a solid record of delivering proportional results' - another outright falsehood, since by pretty much any measure STV has a solid record of delivering proportional results as well.

As for achieving gender equity, I've been over this ground many times. I don't think allowing party leaders to basically appoint women to MLA positions is the solution to the gender gap nor do I think that differences between countries in the number of women elected can be attributed with any degree of reliability to the electoral system.

"The main advantage of MMP is that it preserves local representation while also ensuring that elected seats accurately reflect the popular vote. Under MMP, minority and coalition governments rather than simple majorities are far more likely.

Because different parties know that they may one day have to work together, the public debate tends to be more respectful than the embarrassing spectacles seen regularly in Victoria or Ottawa. Coalitions also mean that governments are much more accountable to the people between elections - not just on voting day."

Sorry, how is this any different from STV? (and this is the 'main' advantage of MMP -over what? - oh I see, we're doing the old shifting comparison game, comparing MMP vs. FPTP when it suits us and vs. STV when that suits us).

"Countries that use MMP also have better representation from women - up to 42 percent in Sweden. This system has also been shown to significantly increase voter participation - over 80 percent in countries such as Denmark, Sweden, and the Belgium."

Which would be more convincing if a) Those countries actually used MMP and b) Those countries didn't have a long stories historical track record of equitable treatment of women extending across almost all facets of their society. But I'm sure more female MP's is down solely to the electoral system. Imagine how many women would be elected in the Middle East if only they used MMP! note: sarcasm

"There is little doubt that if BC voters had been given the chance to choose the much more popular system of MMP, the results of the referendum would have been very different."

Obviously there's no doubt since MMP is much more popular - the author says so! Less sarcastically, I say 'huh'? Maybe the results would have been different but I'd say there's lots of doubt. Keep in mind that STV's 57% support in B.C. was 3% higher than what MMP got when it was put to the test in New Zealand. And of the pro-STV blogs I listed on my STV-blog, I got the feeling that there were a fair number which supported STV but wouldn't have supported MMP.

"For reasons that remain unclear, the Citizens Assembly instead chose to disregard the vast majority of public input and recommend BC-STV"

The reasons are not unclear, they were spelled out (clearly) on the Assembly website and if the author had contacted any of the assembly members for an explanation I'm sure they would have answered at length as they did when the question came up at the public forum I went to.

Of course the reasons were the disadvantages that come with MMP (different classes of MLA's, the need to add more MLA's to the legislature, too much power in the hands of party leaders being the main ones) but maybe the author would rather cast vague aspersions against the integrity of the Assembly members than deal with the cognitive dissonance of how dedicated intelligent people studying the problem for a year might not think his favoured system is the best.

"As for the die-hard boosters of BC-STV, the rules of the referendum are clear and though they came close, they lost. They should now graciously admit defeat, and either pitch in on the new struggle for a more palatable system of electoral reform, or clear out of the way.

Some BC-STV zealots have now suggested that the referendum threshold of the 60 percent should now be lowered retroactively to allow their preference to succeed. Can you image the outrage if the threshold was retroactively raised had BC-STV had achieved 63 percent support?"

The rules were clear, but perhaps not clear enough for the author to understand them properly. The mandate for the referendum only stated that the government would be required to bring in STV if it got 60% support, NOT that it would be forbidden to do so without that support. So the author's comparison is a false and misleading one. In fact, the vast majority of all changes in electoral systems have been made with less public support than the 57% who voted in favour of STV. Even having a referendum at all set a higher bar than is often used (PEI is planning a referendum with a 50% threshold, and last I heard Quebec was planning electoral reform without a referendum).

On a more personal level, I find it irritating to have someone suggest I clear out of the way in one paragraph and accuse STV-supporters of being zealots in the very next paragraph.


Stepping back a bit, I should note that I have nothing against MMP. I think it's a perfectly good system (far better than our current one) and I think B.C. voters should have the chance to vote on it. What I don't like are articles which contain multiple falsehoods, articles which try to exploit statistics the author knows (or should know) are misleading, articles which prefer to cast aspersions on upstanding citizens rather than acknowledge the weakness in their case and articles which resort to name calling instead of making logical arguments (STV is referred to in the article in various places as 'obscure', 'arcane', 'baffling', a 'pig in a poke', a 'dud', and an 'unfortunate artifact', and its supporters are called 'die-hards' and 'zealots').

If your argument makes sense then you should have the courage to make it honestly and not resort to a host of cheap debating tricks to try and fool the reader into supporting your point rather than making an informed decision for themselves.

---
¹ From 'Sketch' off the album 'Connected' by the Stereo MC's.