this post was submitted on 13 May 2025
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First past the post is stupid. The post itself is stupid. Get rid of the post, fix our democracy, don't let a single vote change an election, and don't have thousands of votes in this riding not matter regardless of which way the final decision goes.
A single vote can matter, no matter the system.
Language is funny like that, isn't it.
A single vote shouldn't "matter" in the sense that no single person's vote should have a huge effect on the outcome of the election. But every vote should matter in the sense that every vote should have a small effect on the outcome and that effect should be guaranteed for every vote that was cast.
A single vote does "matter" and should "matter" in a case like this where we're split equally between two candidates. The last vote to make/break a tie is very important.
That's well and true, but I think what the person you replied to is getting at is that the representation of an entire riding should not hinge on a single vote. Whether Terrebonne ends up Liberal or BQ, the entire representation of the riding hinging on a few votes is ridiculous, and proportional representation would avoid these issues.
How would proportional representation change this?
In this case there would never be "won by a single vote" because any party that gets a minimum percentage of the vote already has a seat. More importantly, the people that voted for the "losing party" would have better representation as more of the vote would go to smaller parties (that better represent the minority of people) thereby making the house of commons a better representation of Canada. In contrast FPTP means any party that get's >50% of the votes has most of the power which means anyone that didn't vote for them is essentially left without a voice in the HoC, or at least a greatly diminished voice.
Personally I just really hate seeing policy whiplash with liberal and conservative PMs undoing each others bills when one or the other is elected (especially on a provincial level). 🤦
...this is also not to mention PR would likely increase voter turnout by a lot.
https://www.fairvote.ca/what-is-proportional-representation/
*I think there would be no single MP for any one riding, but rather each MP in that riding that has a minimum amount of votes has a seat. I'm not too well versed in how it would be implemented in Canada so I would check out fairvotes website rather then listening to a tired biochem student.
Aaaah OK. So as soon as a candidate gets X number of votes, they have s seat? So in a riding, there could be more than one MP?
That's the way I understand it.
It's as equally important as every other vote.
Not really though, I live in Red Deer. It'd take 3/4ths of the Conservative voters to sleep in (in addition to the ones who already did) for my vote to have made a difference.
In ridings where it's close-ish, you can still trigger trends that result in more spending on your riding, but when it's 80:20 your riding will always be ignored. FPTP sucks.
We're talking of a riding here where the votes would have been exactly 50/50 for the top 2 representatives and would have triggered a by-election. Of course it matters!
Well in this riding yeah - my point is that in FPTP every vote matters in some ridings, but in many, it just doesn't
FPTP ultimately is anti-hope; it's built functionally so that, pragmatically, you're generally not voting for the people you like the best, you're voting against the person you like the least. And it ultimately renders MPs/MLAs useless and performative frequently.
The whole thing is pretty messy when you get into it. Thankfully here we aren't Electoral College awful (where a single vote can potentially move ~50 seats one way or the other in a comparable situation), but that implies the bar is on the floor.
We can do better, even incrementally.
Love this idea. Yes, everyone should have a say and have representation of their choice!
Has FPTP always been this problematic in canadian history?
How did this "work" for the first 100 years of confederation?