Bloc Québécois voter’s mail-in ballot was returned to sender after the election
Elections Canada said the return address printed on this elector’s return envelope was incorrect — specifically, part of the postal code.
Courts could force byelection, expert says
But Ara Karaboghossian, professor of political science at Vanier College, says there’s a chance this saga isn’t over. He said the election could be contested through Elections Canada’s contested elections process. He said irregularities can be the basis for contesting a decision
“It says that if there is any type of irregularity that has an effect on the result, then the person can actually contest,” said Karaboghossian. “The elector can contest. A candidate can contest. It’s open to anybody.”
The case will hinge on what an irregularity is, but it seems to Karaboghossian that a misprint on a self-addressed, stamped envelope could fall into that category.
Good news for Bloc Québécois
First past the post is stupid. The post itself is stupid. Get rid of the post, fix our democracy, don’t let a single vote change an election, and don’t have thousands of votes in this riding not matter regardless of which way the final decision goes.
FPTP ultimately is anti-hope; it’s built functionally so that, pragmatically, you’re generally not voting for the people you like the best, you’re voting against the person you like the least. And it ultimately renders MPs/MLAs useless and performative frequently.
The whole thing is pretty messy when you get into it. Thankfully here we aren’t Electoral College awful (where a single vote can potentially move ~50 seats one way or the other in a comparable situation), but that implies the bar is on the floor.
We can do better, even incrementally.
A single vote can matter, no matter the system.
Language is funny like that, isn’t it.
A single vote shouldn’t “matter” in the sense that no single person’s vote should have a huge effect on the outcome of the election. But every vote should matter in the sense that every vote should have a small effect on the outcome and that effect should be guaranteed for every vote that was cast.
A single vote does “matter” and should “matter” in a case like this where we’re split equally between two candidates. The last vote to make/break a tie is very important.
That’s well and true, but I think what the person you replied to is getting at is that the representation of an entire riding should not hinge on a single vote. Whether Terrebonne ends up Liberal or BQ, the entire representation of the riding hinging on a few votes is ridiculous, and proportional representation would avoid these issues.
How would proportional representation change this?
In this case there would never be “won by a single vote” because any party that gets a minimum percentage of the vote already has a seat. More importantly, the people that voted for the “losing party” would have better representation as more of the vote would go to smaller parties (that better represent the minority of people) thereby making the house of commons a better representation of Canada. In contrast FPTP means any party that get’s >50% of the votes has most of the power which means anyone that didn’t vote for them is essentially left without a voice in the HoC, or at least a greatly diminished voice.
Personally I just really hate seeing policy whiplash with liberal and conservative PMs undoing each others bills when one or the other is elected (especially on a provincial level). 🤦
…this is also not to mention PR would likely increase voter turnout by a lot.
https://www.fairvote.ca/what-is-proportional-representation/
*I think there would be no single MP for any one riding, but rather each MP in that riding that has a minimum amount of votes has a seat. I’m not too well versed in how it would be implemented in Canada so I would check out fairvotes website rather then listening to a tired biochem student.
Aaaah OK. So as soon as a candidate gets X number of votes, they have s seat? So in a riding, there could be more than one MP?
It’s as equally important as every other vote.
Not really though, I live in Red Deer. It’d take 3/4ths of the Conservative voters to sleep in (in addition to the ones who already did) for my vote to have made a difference.
In ridings where it’s close-ish, you can still trigger trends that result in more spending on your riding, but when it’s 80:20 your riding will always be ignored. FPTP sucks.
We’re talking of a riding here where the votes would have been exactly 50/50 for the top 2 representatives and would have triggered a by-election. Of course it matters!
Well in this riding yeah - my point is that in FPTP every vote matters in some ridings, but in many, it just doesn’t
Love this idea. Yes, everyone should have a say and have representation of their choice!
Has FPTP always been this problematic in canadian history?
How did this “work” for the first 100 years of confederation?
So if there’s a tie, it triggers a byelection? How weird!
Just going off the article alone, I’m not 100% sure if that’s the rule. But it sounds reasonable enough…
This is another reason why proportional representation is a better system. One vote wouldn’t matter because one vote wouldn’t flip a riding or change the number and type of representatives who become MPs. After all, the percentage of MPs elected in the riding wouldn’t change significantly enough with one vote.
The money and resources used for this one vote, along with court time and a potential byelection, make a mockery of our democratic process.
With proportional representation, we would have the same or fewer elections than we have now.
This is another reason why proportional representation is a better system. One vote wouldn’t matter because one vote wouldn’t flip a riding or change the number and type of representatives who become MPs. After all, the percentage of MPs elected in the riding wouldn’t change significantly enough with one vote.
Agree 100%, we definitely need to move to PR ASAP.
With proportional representation, we would have the same or fewer elections than we have now.
Elsewhere on the piefediverse I’ve seen the argument made that PR also generally leads to other benefits like better cooperation between candidates and less mudslinging.
The money and resources used for this one vote, along with court time and a potential byelection, make a mockery of our democratic process.
I mean it does have it’s uses. The byelection for the two Georgia Senate seats back in 2020 (technically a pair of runoff elections) is what ensured the Dems senate majority back then.
The fact that proportional representation reduces polarization and makes parties cooperative instead of adversarial is the number one reason I want it.
It makes countries more democratic and balanced.
It does also make governance more challenging. See Holland and Belgium.
Belgium and the Netherlands’ specific political turmoil has nothing to do with proportional representation and only concerns the local issues their citizens believe in and the parties in contention over them. The same happens in first-past-the-post countries with higher frequency and more volatility while concentrating power in more extreme parties, like the United States.
On top of that, being compared to the Netherlands and Belgium is flattering. They’ve both had fewer elections than Canada since 1945 Higher voter turnout, Parliamentary term completion rates are 14 and 15% higher therefore less policy lurch
Countries with proportional representation show that if a party’s policies deviate significantly from mainstream opinion, other parties will unite to exclude them from power. This is an additional check and balance that Canada doesn’t have, and this additional protection has been performed in Belgium and the Netherlands before.
No system of government will make a conflict-free paradise, but we know that proportional representation will lead to a more civilized and balanced representation of their citizens’ values.
