• Home
  • News
  • Stories
    • Learning & Literacy
    • Food, Farming & Fishing >
      • Recipe Collection
    • Culture & Heritage
    • Wellness
    • Environment
    • Opinions, letters and reflections
  • About Us
  • Jobs
    • Job Posting Submission Form
    • Job Postings
  • E-magazine
  • Calendar
  • Albert County
    • Living in Albert County
    • Our Villages
    • Attractions
  • Advertising
  • Donate
  • Exploring Our Trails
  • Blog
Connecting Albert County

opinions, Letters, ​​and
​reflections
​

Electoral Reform: Single Member-Proportional Vote (aka The Bennett Method)

1/6/2016

0 Comments

 
Picture
The Single Member-Proportional Vote (SM-PV) system (aka The Bennett Method after the former Prime Minister from Albert County) has been proposed by James Wilson, a 28-year-old who was born and raised in Albert County. After studying political science, history, and classical political thought at Mount Allison University, he went to Alberta to get work at the end of 2013.
​
Continue to read his story and his proposal for electoral reform.

While working as a night auditor for a Comfort Inn in Fox Creek, Alberta I had a random thought; What if you made MP votes stronger or weaker based on how well they did in the election? Could you make First-past-the-post proportional by doing this?

The first draft of my idea covered two memo pad sheets. While the final name for my system is Single Member-Proportional Vote (SM-PV), its working name for much of the time was the 'Bennett Method,’ named for former Prime Minister R.B. Bennett who was also born and raised in Albert County. I believe as a successful businessman he would have been familiar with the underlying concept of my idea (corporate stockholders have weighted votes based on how many stocks they have). Further I think the Tory Prime Minister would have appreciated an idea for electoral reform that aims to keep as much of the present system intact as is feasible.

After I moved back to New Brunswick at the start of 2015 I had some time to give my idea a re-think. Because my idea didn't modify seat totals or the voting method I was able to use the results of past federal and New Brunswick elections to test out if my idea met its goal of making parliament more proportional.

An early version of my idea also sought to reward MPs who did very well in their ridings.  However, to do this required a series of complex mathematical steps that actually made the results only slightly better than the current setup and didn't give well-performing MPs that much of a boost.

In March 2015, I abandoned the idea of rewarding MPs who get large percentages of the vote allowed me to have results that better reflected the popular vote and weeded out some of the weirder results that popped up in the old system.

The system now only had two goals:
1. Make votes in Parliament be based off of the popular vote rather than seat count, and
2. Keep as much of the current system in place as possible.

As I was attempting to put together my proposal I discovered that I was not the only one looking at this type of system. Stephen Johnson in the UK has been working on a similar idea. I was happy to see I wasn't the only one thinking about this idea and I used his proposal as a loose template for how I organized mine.

Read the detailed proposal  here. 
0 Comments



Leave a Reply.

    Views from Albert County

    Connecting Albert County would like to thank the following supporters & advertisers:

    Platinum supporters
    - Bennett and Albert County Health Care (BACH) Foundation  
    ​- Albert County Pharmacy
    - CR Yardworks & Equipment
    ​​- Hon. Rob Moore, MP for Fundy Royal


    Gold supporters
    - CBDC Westmorland Albert 
    - ​Albert County Funeral Home​​


    Silver supporters
    - 
    Albert County Chamber of Commerce 
    - Crooked Creek Convenience 
    - East Coast Kids Child Care & Learning Centre
    ​ 
    - 
    Fireside Home Heating
    ​ 
    - 
    Foods of the Fundy Valley​
    - The Garden Guy (Micheal McBurnie) 
    - 
    Hon. Mike Holland, Minister, MLA-Albert 
    ​
    - 
    The Old Church Farmers' Market​
    - Village of Hillsborough
    - Village of Riverside-Albert

    Bronze supporters

    - Broadleaf Ranch ​
    - 
    ​Chipoudy Communities Revitalization Committee (CCRC)
    ​
    - 
    Cape Enrage Fundy Log Cabin
    - Falcon Ridge Inn B&B 
    - Fundy Highlands Motel and Chalets
    - 
    Fundy Mud Pottery 

    - Jeff MacDougall, SouthEastern Mutual Insurance 
    -​ Village of Alma


    If you would like to support Connecting Albert County, visit our Advertising page or Donation page. With your support, we can continue to share the news of rural Albert County.

    Comments
    We welcome comments to our blog postings. Please provide your email address and name with your comment, and respect our content guidelines.

    Archives

    March 2021
    February 2021
    January 2021
    December 2020
    June 2020
    May 2020
    April 2020
    February 2020
    January 2020
    December 2019
    September 2019
    May 2019
    April 2019
    November 2018
    October 2018
    July 2018
    June 2018
    November 2017
    June 2017
    May 2017
    December 2016
    September 2016
    July 2016
    June 2016
    August 2015
    July 2015
    June 2015
    May 2015

    Categories

    All
    Albert County
    Albert County NB
    Alma
    Alma Celebration Days
    Bay Of Fundy
    Buy Local
    Chamber Of Commerce
    Childcare
    Childhood
    Children
    Christmas
    Christmas Shopping
    Community Collaboration
    Community Events
    Community Involvement
    Couchsurfing
    Daycare
    Day Care
    Drivers
    East Coast Kids
    Economy
    Ecosystem
    Education
    Educators
    Electoral Reform
    Farmers Market
    Fundy
    Fundy Park
    Fundy Shoreline
    Harvest
    Hillsborough
    History
    Home-made Candles
    Home-made Gifts
    Honourable Mike Holland
    Hopewell Rocks
    Hospitality
    Learning
    Local Service Districts
    Logging
    LSDs
    Marshes
    Memoir
    Moranda Van Geest
    Mystery
    NB
    New Brunswick
    Nuts
    Open Letter
    Poetry
    Protected Area
    Public Library
    Response
    Riverside-Albert
    Road Construction
    Salt Marsh
    Save Our Seed
    Seed Campaign
    Shepody
    Shepody Food Bank
    Shepody Mountain
    Single Member-Proportional Vote
    Southeast Regional Service Commission
    Spring
    The Old Church Farmers Market
    Tourism
    Urban Drivers
    Vendors
    Volunteer
    Warm Showers
    Waterside
    Woodlots

    RSS Feed

CONTACT
ADVERTISING
CALENDAR
​PUBLICATION

SiteLock
Copyright © Connecting Albert County, 2016 | Albert County, New Brunswick, Canada
  • Home
  • News
  • Stories
    • Learning & Literacy
    • Food, Farming & Fishing >
      • Recipe Collection
    • Culture & Heritage
    • Wellness
    • Environment
    • Opinions, letters and reflections
  • About Us
  • Jobs
    • Job Posting Submission Form
    • Job Postings
  • E-magazine
  • Calendar
  • Albert County
    • Living in Albert County
    • Our Villages
    • Attractions
  • Advertising
  • Donate
  • Exploring Our Trails
  • Blog