A legitimate concern about the upcoming referendum is that the ballot has been skewed to favour proportional representation over first-past-the-post.
This is because the ballot consists of two questions, and FPTP is an option only in the first question. As a consequence, if 49 per cent of voters prefer FPTP, 18 per cent prefer dual-member proportional, 17 per cent prefer mixed-member proportional, and 16 per cent prefer rural-urban proportional, then DMP wins even though more than twice as many voters prefer FPTP.聽
The ballot would be fair to the FPTP option only if anyone who prefers PR prefers聽all聽versions of PR to FPTP 鈥� but this is not necessarily the case. For example, a voter might believe fundamentally that a person鈥檚 vote should be treated the same whether they reside in an urban or rural riding, and would prefer to stick with FPTP rather than have that feature in a PR system.
To allow a voter to express this type of preference, the ballot should have been designed to include FPTP as one of the options in the second question.聽
To determine if sa国际传媒 residents truly want a new electoral system, the question needs to be posed using a fair voting mechanism, and not by way of a ballot biased against FPTP.
Constance Smith
Victoria
