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.
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.
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.
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