
In parliamentary elections using STV, voters rank candidates running in multi-member ridings (instead of casting a single 'X' next to one candidate). A group of candidates is elected, representing various parties and perspectives, all of them are accountable to the voters. Instead of one person representing your interests, you have several people elected to represent your interests. This is different from our "Winner-Take-All" system where one candidate with the most votes wins the whole constituency outright.
Voters in British Columbia are set to get another chance to endorse STV in a referendum in 2009 (58% of B.C. voters endorsed STV in a 2005 referendum, but the government-imposed 60% threshold meant passage was denied.) If over 60% of B.C. voters embrace STV in 2009, it will mark the beginning of true democracy in Canadian elections...
"STV ensures that a representative democracy is truly representative — that the opinions of all blocs of voters are represented, in the proportion with which those opinions are held by the population. It is used for a variety of elections in many Western democracies, including the United Kingdom, Australia and New Zealand. About two-dozen U.S. cities, including New York, have used STV at various points; Cambridge, Mass., still does, and Minneapolis will starting in 2009 for certain offices..."
"Voters just head to the voting booth and rank candidates by preference on a standard ballot; if a voter’s first choice doesn’t get the number of votes needed to win a seat, his or her vote is counted in the next round for their second choice, and so on. STV makes it more likely that a given individual’s vote, or a give bloc of votes, will make a difference. And because of this, it tends to sharply boost participation. It minimizes the problem of the “wasted” vote, whereby some votes don’t help elect any candidate at all, and voters for that candidate go entirely unrepresented. STV also makes politics less negative, encouraging cooperation among candidates."
"A candidate wants to be the first choice of as many voters as possible, but also wants to be the second choice of the rest, and so doesn’t want to turn them off. Dennis Kucinich, for instance, urged his supporters to caucus for Barack Obama in precincts where Kucinich didn’t have enough support to win a delegate of his own."
"There’s a strong case to be made that one reason STV is used less than it used to be in the United States is precisely because it actually achieved its aims: It yielded a level of popular representation and participation that made it harder for the wealthy and party bosses to wield ironclad control over politics in jurisdictions where it was used, and so they pushed back and got rid of it."