Voter turnout is higher where STV is used

Almost everyone is concerned about low voter turnout rates in BC and Canada - the last election in BC produced a turnout of only 58% and the last federal election was at only 59%. Such low participation rates demonstrate that our key democratic institutions are losing some of their legitimacy. Would adopting BC-STV change that?

While there are no guarantees, we believe that the evidence is that it would. The noted political scientist, Arend Lijphart, addressed this issue in his 1999 book, Patterns of Democracy, in which he surveyed the results of over 50 years of elections in 36 western democracies. He concluded that, overall, countries with more proportional voting systems (what he termed 'consensus democracies') had a voting turnout 5-10% higher than that of majoritarian democracies such as Canada and the UK.

Why might this be so? A very plausible reason is that if your jurisdiction has a voting system in which your vote is more likely to affect the outcome, there is more incentive to vote. Since only 36% of votes were needed to determine the outcome in the 2005 BC election, vs about 81% if we had used BC-STV, BC-STV would clearly give your vote more impact.

Opponents respond (with some justification) that voter turnout is a complex issue and point out that voter turnout is declining even in countries that use STV. While true, the following chart shows that, overall, countries using STV and other more proportional systems such as MMP (mixed member proportional) have markedly higher voter turnout rates than countries such as Canada, the USA and the UK which use our significantly less representative First Past the Post voting system. Ireland with STV has had approximately the same turnout as the UK with FPTP, but seems to have avoided the downturn over the past decade that Canada and the UK have experienced. Generally speaking, Ireland has had about 10% higher turnout than BC over the past 25 years.

In addition, voter turnout in Malta, which uses STV at the national level, is the highest in the world amongst countries with non-compulsory voting - 93-96%. In contrast, turnout in Canada places us about 80th in the world (see the Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance website on voter turnout for historical details on a country-by-country basis).

Opponents sometimes point to New Zealand and try to claim that when they switched to a more proportional system for the 1996 election, it did not arrest the decline in voter turnout, but the chart shows that New Zealand still enjoys roughly an 80% turnout rate - little lower than under FPTP - so it is quite plausible to claim that switching to MMP likely reduced the decline in turnout that other western Commonwealth countries have experienced.

Given that BC-STV will more than double the number of votes that will have an effect on the outcome and that countries with more proportional voting systems generally enjoy a 5-10% higher voter turnout than countries using FPTP, supporters of the status quo must bear the burden of explaining why BC-STV will not have a positive impact on voter turnout here in BC.