Nancy: "When such [women] as I, who have no certain roof but the coffin-lid, and no friend in sickness or death but the hospital nurse, set our rotten hearts on any man, and let him fill the place that has been a blank through all our wretched lives, who can hope to cure us? Pity us, lady--pity us for having only one feeling of the woman left, and for having that turned, by a heavy judgement, from a comfort and a pride, into a new means of violence and suffering"--Oliver Twist
Last week was Ontario's provincial election, and this was the seat result, under the "first past the post" system:
Progressive Conservative: 83
NDP: 31
Liberal: 8
Green: 1
Once again, I've imagined how it would have turned out under the mixed proportional representation system I favour. That's the one where A seats (about 70%) would be directly elected in the same way as before; B seats (about 25%) would be allotted to parties so that the total of A and B seats would be as close to the popular vote as possible; and C seats (about 5%) would be given to the top party in popular vote, to improve the chances of a stable majority. But if one party got a landslide, so that its A seats alone were greater than its proportional number of A and B seats, the C seats would go to the other parties to bring them closer to their vote proportion. Which happens to be the case here.
Party A seats/ B/ C/ Total
PC 83 83
NDP 31 13 2 46
Lib 8 17 2 27
Green 1 1 2 4
Under this system, the Progressive Conservatives would still have a narrow majority. Under the present system they won 2/3 of the seats with just 2/5 of the vote. Under my system, the opposition parties would each receive half a dozen fewer seats than if the vote were purely proportional, though the C seats would provide a slight compensation. The Liberals were only slightly below the NDP in popular vote, but the PC advantage in seats particularly works against them.
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