Polarised politics

This Blog is a collection of posts and links ( in favour/against and neutral) relating to why residents of British Columbia should vote in favour of changing the electoral system to Single Transferable Vote (STV) on May 17. The STV system in place in Malta is a point of reference in this hot debate in Canada. Declan who favours a Yes vote responds to Norman Spector:

After reading Norman Spector's latest comments on STV in the Vancouver Sun, I have come to the conclusion that it is (past) time for him to depart from the column writing business...

But further down, Norman backs his point up by saying that we don't want to become like Malta (which uses STV), since Malta is, "a country that's infamous for polarized politics." The thing is, Malta is also famous as the only jurisdiction which uses STV and which still has a two-party structure. So the infamously polarized Malta has a two party system, just like we do now, and Spector is basically contradicting his argument that a two-party system is the recipe for non-polarization.

There's more. Spector also claims that, "To date, proponents of the new voting system have been unwilling or unable to explain clearly where my vote and your votes would go after we mark our ballots. "Now the unwilling part is absurd. It is the Yes side which has a strong interest in explaining the STV system as well and as clearly as possible and a visit to any Yes-vote supporting site will reveal a strong emphasis on doing exactly that. For Yes supporters, ignorance (like Spector's) is our enemy.

Backgrounder to STV debate in British Columbia, Canada

Crawl across the ocean - Canadian politics blog

Single Transferable Nonsense - from Wired Temples

Malta: STV with some twists; STV - lessons from Malta; STV - Malta Case study