Ontario Referendum On Electoral Reform- Your Vote?

[Moonlight_Graham]

voting is very, very fun!!!

[nag95]

the current electoral system is crappy, the new one, worse. electable seats are reduced to 90 seats from 100 something then increased to 129. so we can vote in 90 politicians to represent our interests but then the parties get to put in who ever they want for the other 39 ppl.those 39 ppl can be anyone, and they are not beholden to the ppl. so they don't have to worry about doing what The People want b/c they weren't elected by the people they were put there by the party. so some joker who made major donations, like belinda stronach, to the party can buy a seat. or some party hack who is owed favours but couldn't get nominated in his own community for being a retard could get a seat.they only have loyalties to the party and serve the party line rather than the people. so you could get the conservatives could get in and put in a bunch of crazy right wing Christian evangelical nazis who could never be elected in ontario but can get in b/c the party appointed them.that's why the referendum will not go through and is a bad idea. have you noticed that none of the parties have even discussed the ref. its b/c it is in their best interest to have the ref. go through but they don't want to screw it up by ppl actually knowing that it is anti-democratic.though i agree that more regional representation would be great. but northern ontario is always ignored.not enough ppl, especially compared to the south.

[CanadianMaple09]

I voted to keep the current system. As nag95 said, in the new system there would actually be less direct representation. My main worry though was the power it would give to minority parties, such as the Christian Heritage Party and Family Coalition Party. These are parties who want to ban gay marriage, revoke all abortion laws, and divert funding from public education into private religious schools (but only those of their religion, of course). If these parties knew they only had to get 3% of the popular vote in order to gain representation, they would run candidates in a lot more ridings. They wouldn't even have to win a single riding in order to be represented. Also, a lot of the details would not be worked out until after the government was elected. Scary to vote for something whose exact boundaries, limitations, and parameters you don't even know.

[ToadMan]

Mixed Member Proportional Representation is a superior electoral system. The reason is simple, it prevents spurious majorities from happening. A spurious majority is when a party wins a majority government despite having less than a plurality of the popular vote. Case and point: To win a seat in a 4 member riding you need 26% of that ridings votes, if every riding received only this many votes, then you would have 74% of people against the government with majority control. Although this is a radical example, spurious majorities have occurred several times over the past few decades.

 

MMP creates a threshold that requires parties not winning a riding seat to receive a minimum amount of popular vote to get a seat. In New Zealand this threshold is 5%.

 

I have a few more arguments for MMP and can direct you to some great scholarly papers on the subject if you still don't agree.