About Voting Reform

A non solution to a non problem.

Once upon a time I was an advocate for reforming the voting system in Canada. I thought this would improve the way government worked. Then I became smarter.

This article is about how that occurred. Also, how I gradually caught on to the real problem with government in Canada, and the real solution. We do not need democratic reform, we need to understand what a democracy is, and that we do not have one.

My big turnaround was about twenty years ago, when I was running around with a clipboard behind Queen’s park, collecting signatures for Fair Vote Canada (FVC). I encountered a very cynical lady who had hard questions about voting reform.

I explained that the present voting system allowed political parties to get a majority of seats with a minority of the vote.

“So, what is wrong with that?”

Well, that was unfair to the other parties, and to the voters who voted for them.

“So what is unfair about it?”

Well, people do not get a representative from the party they voted for.

“So what? Why is that unfair?”

I went on a bit, with the usual FairVote points, which have not changed from then until now. I started to see that this lady had a seemingly inarguable point.

But what concerned me was the attitude I got when I brought this to key members of FairVote. Not only did they had no ready answer to it, they were unwilling to even think about it. They totally brushed off that line of thought.

I remained engaged with FVC for some time. I sat on the council of the local chapter for awhile. I had the idea of getting them thinking about the political system beyond just changing the way the seats in the legislature were allotted.

I came to see the essentially antidemocratic attitudes of most of these people. As I looked into the issue of deep democracy, I began to understand what was behind these attitudes. Voting reform is for people with a liberal mentality, and who are committed to outdated assumptions from the last century.

I thought, way back in the 1980s, that voting reform would lead to more enlightened governments, and more progressive policies. I could look at other countries and see that the ones in which it was easier for ordinary or disadvantaged people to live in, usually had proportional voting systems. The Voting reform movement in Canada later made this one of their main points.

However, this is a ‘post hoc’ fallacy. Something happens along with, therefore because of. European societies are generally more progressive to begin with.

Two things gradually showed me that mere voting reform did not lead to more enlightened policies. Some countries, such as France, did not have PR, but had some of the world’s best social provisions. Some countries adopted PR voting, but it did not improve their political culture at all.

What usually resulted in more socialized government was when the power of finance and industrial oligarchies was curbed. This was the case in most western countries in the era after the world wars. Of course, this age ended after the 1990s.

Another of FVC’s main arguments is that Proportional Representation (PR), leads to more collegial government and broader representation of opinions. A governing coalition of parties is forced to cooperate with each other. There is not merely the “in” and the ”out” party, hollering at each other during question period.

This may be true, but it is simply not clear that this leads to better government. Several parties under PR can still be left out of the government, the ideas of their supporters not considered. It is not generally accepted that good government is simply about finding the compromise that keeps the most people happy.

However, in the models which FVC liked to follow, all of them western liberal democracies, this worked reasonably well until the age of neoLiberalism. With the advent of more aggressive economic elites, who do not accept democracy, this does not work. In this century, the assumptions behind PR have fallen apart.

Something has become clear about the PR mode of governance. It is unable to respond to challenges, where stronger leadership is required. Especially, where reconstruction of institutions may be required which will not be initially popular.

Neoliberals and economic libertarians have shown they can sweep aside PR governments just as easily as majoritarian ones. They use their economic power, and in particular their control over media, to keep the population confused. Less well understood is their ability to saturate all political parties with their own agents.

In the case of most of Europe, they have used the European union to create an unreachable level of government, above national government and their legislatures. In the case of Italy, they created a coalition which promised to curb the power of the EU over the country. As soon as she was in office, Meloni threw the mask away, and straight out told the public that it had been bamboozled and could do nothing about it.

Germany has endured several years of the “traffic light” coalition. This was an alliance of three parties with presumably different ideas of government. Yet the members of Der Bundestag for all these parties had no trouble supporting policies which were against their party’s basic principles, against the desires of their memberships, against the desire of most Germans, and which were an irreversible disaster for the country.

In New Zealand, which FVC loves to cite as an example, the extreme right harassed an effective prime minister out of office. Due to economic disruption and intimidation, no centre left government could do anything to solve the nation’s problems. So in frustration, the voters turned to right of centre parties.

This election created exactly the situation which proponents of PR insist cannot happen. The centre right national party, the dog, can either let the extreme right “New Zealand First” party, the tail, wag it, or it can call new elections. A new election would likely have the same results as the last.

This is probably the worst problem with a PR system; elections usually produce the same results repeatedly. Change happens only gradually, with dramatic shifts impossible. This is disaster when there is a crisis within ruling parties and the present government needs to be thrown out.

Thus, the extreme right in New Zealand are getting the policies they want. They have the system cornered. The will of the majority is thwarted.

Beyond all this, the big problem with a PR voting system is that it is still government by elected representatives. No different than a majoritarian system, or “first past the post”, it is a plan for oligarchy. Democracies usually work according to sortition.

Political theorists from Plato up to Montesquieu have made this point. The point has only been forgotten about in modern times. Those with power to control public discussion, and a desire for a fundamentally oligarchic government, have helped the public to forget.

Western countries have not had this contradiction in terms called ‘representative democracy’ for long. In the struggles in Europe during the late nineteenth century, early democrats wanted some form of government based on popular assemblies, or on sortition. They took on ideas from the Ancient Greek democracies, and the medieval free cities.

They did not really want the ‘Anglo-American model’ forced on them. That is, representative elections and the idea of ‘separation of powers’ and ‘Rule of Law’. Some concessions were made to them, and they gradually came to accept this model.

Now that this model is breaking down, people in Europe are starting to look into this subject again. Yet people in North America are still clueless about possible modes of doing real democracy.

Very few FVC people had a clue what I was talking about, when I tried to discuss this. The few who had some vague idea about it thought it was too advanced and wanted to do PR first.

I have been following discussions in the English language about sortition. It is mostly from the United Kingdom. However, the New Zealanders also seem very interested.

Sortition means electing deliberative bodies by lot from among qualified candidates. There are many modes of this, to fit various purposes. Most often they act as ‘mini publics’, drawn together to examine an issue, give a judgement about it, and then disband.

Some people propose replacing elected legislatures with sortition bodies, chosen by lot. There are many questions about this. It would place heavy demands on those chosen. They would still be dependent on the information available to them.

Some people are obsessed with the idea of sortition. It is in danger of becoming another ‘beautiful idea’ cult much like PR in Canada.

Another idea for a ‘deliberative democracy’ is popular assemblies, where everyone participates. Obviously, this would only work with local governments. Yet it is interesting that in cases where a public has to come up with a government model over a larger area, they develop a system of delegated assemblies.

In a delegated system, a local assembly chooses one or more delegates. They go to the higher assembly, hear what the issues are, then report back to the local assembly. They get instructions, go again to the higher assembly, convey the sense of the local assembly, or give its vote, then return to their assemblies, and the cycle continues.

Such assemblies have operated in some modern states as a part of the government structure. However, no modern state has tried to run a purely deliberative democracy.

This is unlikely to be achieved except through a revolution and dictatorship. Even then, it would be an experiment by a transformative dictatorship or trusteeship.

This gets us to the real problem with FVC. It is a distraction from what really needs to be done to solve the present problems with government. It misidentifies these problems.

Detailed discussion of how a deliberative democracy, a real democracy, would work in a country like Canada, is beyond the scope of this article. Such discussion is not happening yet in Canada. FVC is a big hindrance to that.

FVC adherents generally have the idea, very common in the Anglosphere, that government and politics is all about debates and brokering interests. Of course you cannot run a government or a society that way. This is liberalism.

Liberalism is the most dangerous and destructive of ideologies. It puts everybody into categories. Everybody is accepted as long as they accept the categories assigned to them.

But in Liberal land, no one’s feelings are allowed to be hurt. They can not be made to feel ‘out of place’. Nothing can be ‘unfair’. But if you step outside this, you are evil and everything will be done to drive you away.

So to ideological liberals, not quite the same thing as political liberals, everything has to be ‘fair’. Everybody must feel they have been heard, their interests considered. That is even if the underlying relationships are grossly unfair, they are held in contempt, not really listened to, and their interests not really considered.

So to Liberals, government is a big show. Everyone gets to feel they have a ‘voice’. They are encouraged to stay ‘engaged’.

However, in the end it is only those with real clout who get a say. Worse, we do not get coherent policies. Everything is a compromise between the most powerful interests. Usually, these are focused, not on pushing any measure, but on preventing anything happening which might interfere with with their ‘interests’.

This, incidentally, is why it is so hard to get anything done in liberal Canada. Our present system is designed to facilitate this kind of behaviour. What I eventually realized about FVC is that its core members are deeply committed to philosophic liberalism, and any divergent view is pushed out.

FVC maintains a strong core of true believers who think this reform will improve the system form their point of view. I have noticed they mostly come from privileged backgrounds. Their real problem with the present arrangement is that they think they matter more than they do, and do not think they are being paid enough attention.

They think that if ‘big tent’ political parties were broken up, and smaller ‘boutique’ centres of legislative power were created, they would be listened to better. They are blind to the fact that, no matter how legislatures are organized, they have less real power all the time. No matter what ‘flavour’ a party peddles, it conforms to the establishment narrative or it is demonized and kept at the margins.

Increasingly, people do not see party politics as offering any solutions. This is especially so among the more marginalized classes or opinionations. So, they are uninterested in voting reform.

What they are interested in is how to get good government. That is, one which governs in the interests of the society as a whole, and not as a brokerage for special interests.

The most astute among the subordinated publics look at how other countries are run. They notice that, increasingly, the best run countries are one party states. They are the easiest for ordinary people to live in, with good services, low cost of living, and adequate wages.

They are often called ‘police states’ or ‘dictatorships’. This generally comes from powerful interests which are not able to get their way in these countries. Their attempts at destabilization are shut down by sound state institutions.

Such countries also tend to have more real democracy. Ordinary people do not have political parties or non governmental organizations coopting their voices and interests. There are usually public assemblies and forums where legitimate concerns can be voiced.

Governments in these countries operate on broadly Hobbesian as well as Confucian principles. They understand that they exist to serve the whole society and to provide efficient and fair government. The public understands that no faction has the right to denigrate and destabilize government simply because it does not comply with their ideas.

So now I return to the idea of the present voting system being ‘unfair’. Our entire system is unfair, but not in the way FVC people imagine. It is unfair to everyone except our oligarchy, which it gives maximum opportunity to protect their interests.

In a real democracy, a legislative body is not about brokering interests and being an arena for ideological disputes. This repels normal, fair minded people.

The whole economy and society cannot be micromanaged by a legislature. In fact, the power of present legislative bodies should be divided among several bodies, do deal with specific subjects. What they are about is setting broad policy and appointing people to carry them out.

Executive positions should never be filled through elections, through popularity contests. They must be filled by assemblies, through a process of selecting the most qualified candidate.

A truly democratic popular assembly may be chosen through sortition or be delegates of local assemblies. It must be made up of regular people with regular occupations. Thus it cannot make unreasonable demands on its members time and resources.

Their purpose is to appoint or remove key officials, set policy parameters, and where necessary, to be the public voice, the ultimate decider of truth. Toward this it must deliberate without interference or distraction. It makes decisions based on evidence, not lobbying, and thus must be able to decide what evidence to hear.

Thus, the liberal, oligarchic mentality would find a real democracy to be very unfair. But that is their problem.

The problem with FVC, like most beautiful idea groups, is that they are a distraction from the real problem.