Ask a proponent of the British Columbia Single Transferable Vote system how it works and they’ll simply tell you, “it makes the system fairer.” This is the fundamental pitch of the supporters of BC-STV: “it’s fair.”

But how fair is it?

The question that British Columbians will be asked on May 17th is deceptively simple, “Should British Columbia change to the BC-STV electoral system as recommended by the Citizens' Assembly on Electoral Reform?” But the system that those voting “yes” will be choosing is not.

Supporters tend to have an easy time explaining to people how you will vote under the BC-STV system. When you get your ballot, you’ll be asked to rank all (or as many as you choose) of the candidates on the ballot in order of your preference. So far as the proponents are concerned, that’s all you need to know. But, in my view, a citizen should not only know how they vote, but how their vote will be counted thereafter. That’s where this system falls down.

To begin: you wouldn’t be electing a single MLA, a district could contain anywhere from two to seven seats. Consider the simple implications of that for a just a moment. In BC at this very moment we have two major political parties, the BC Liberals and the NDP and two smaller parties of note: the Green Party and Democratic Reform BC. All of those parties can be expected to run candidates in a majority of ridings. Add smaller parties and independents to the ballot and it’s easily possible that you might have forty different people on a single ballot. Simply counting the candidates of the two major parties, a voter would have to familiarize themselves with the backgrounds and position of fourteen different individuals.

Several people I’ve talked to are of the impression that their votes for multiple candidates would be counted as votes are now for City Councils (meaning that all of the votes would be added up and the top vote getters would be declared elected). That’s simply flat-out wrong. Their votes would be counted by a process so extreme that it makes advanced theoretical physics look simple in compassion.

So: how are your votes actually counted? Well, I’m going to try and explain it to you in under a thousand words.

Let’s assume a theoretical riding with four MLA’s being elected (this, then, is a middle scenario, not the most complex one). There are four Liberal candidates, four NDP candidates, two Green candidates and one Democratic Reform BC candidate. I’m omitting any independent candidates for the sake of simplicity.

Let’s say that 130,000 people vote in this massive four-MLA riding. This allows us to make the first of our many calculations: we need to figure out what the “quota” is, the quota being the number of votes needed for a person to be declared elected. We figure out this number by dividing the total number of votes by the number of MLA’s to be elected plus one. In a riding where 130,000 people voted, the number would be 26,001.

Now we need to add up the first preference voters. Let’s say we have four Liberals (Liberal 1-4) who got 40,000 votes, 13,000 votes, 10,001 votes, and 9999 votes each (the first Liberals is a popular Cabinet Minister, the others are backbenchers). We have four New Democrats who got 20,000 votes, 12,000 votes, 10,000 votes, and 8000 votes. There are two Greens, who got 5000 votes and 1001 votes. And, finally, there’s a Democratic Reform BC candidates who got 999 votes.

To begin: Liberal candidate #1 is over the quota. That means that we now have to calculate their vote surplus. We do this by dividing the number of votes they got above the quota by the total number of votes they received. We then examine the second preference on each ballot and allocate those ballots to the other candidates at the percentage we received as the answer to the previous equation. In this case, it turns out that we’re going to be allocating the equivalent of 13,999 votes.

Now, after we allocate those votes, we find that no candidate is above the quota, so we now have to drop the lowest candidate off the ballot and reallocate their ballots at full value. As it turns out, that ends up being the second Green candidate.

We repeat this process many times (in the spreadsheet I came up with, we have to count the ballots an additional six times) before we get another candidate elected. As it turns out, the second candidate elected is the top New Democrat.

Here’s where another peculiarity of the system can come into play. The lowest ranking Liberal drops off the list, but their votes aren’t enough to put anyone over the top. Thus, we’re left with a list where the two lowest ranking candidates are both New Democrats and the top two candidates are Liberals.

We have a Liberal with 25,200 votes, a Liberal with 18,001 votes, a New Democrat with 18,648 votes, and a New Democrat with 16,149 votes. Because of this, the bottom New Democrat drops off the ballot. Almost all of their votes go to the other New Democrat, resulting in an NDP’er being the third candidate elected. Then, eventually, the votes will also shake up to put the Liberal with 25,200 votes over the top.

In other words, this “fairer” system isn’t even fair. 56% of people voted for a Liberal on their first preference versus 38% who voted for a New Democrat, yet we ended up with two Liberal and two New Democrats elected.

Don’t understand how I calculate the above totals? Don’t worry, no one else will either.

That’s what really worries me about the BC-STV referendum: people won’t understand it. There’s nothing worse for most people than something which obviously exceeds their capacities of comprehension. Rather than admit that they don’t really understand what he hell is going on, I’ll bet that a lot of people will find it easier to simply adopt the line that the system is “fairer” and hope that no one enquires farther.

This is an awful system. You shouldn’t need a massive spreadsheet to figure out how your vote was calculated. When the newspapers publish election results, they ought to be shorter than a Tom Clancy novel.