It's Election Day in the Province of B.C.

It’s election day, here in the Province of British Columbia, to elect a new Provincial Government. Accordingly, my only required job today is to go to our local polling station and cast a ballot – which I will be doing shortly. Being retired – I can drag this out into a full day’s job!!

Unlike previous elections, this hasn’t been a very exciting or interesting campaign, as far as I’m concerned, as there doesn’t seem to be any real hot-button issues. The provinces economy is humming along and in comparison to a lot of other places it is actually quite good. The choices are between the current Liberal majority and the opposition New Democrats with some noise being made by the Green Party even though they currently have no members in the legislature.

Here in B.C. the Liberals are the right-of-centre party while the New Democrats are the left-of-center choice. Given that I really don’t like the leader of either party, I’m not really too enthused about either of them being elected Premier. I think the Liberals will probably win but with a reduced majority in the Legislature.

The more important factor in today’s election, at least to me, is the referendum on changing how we elect representatives. Currently, like most other jurisdictions in Canada and the U.S., we use what’s called ‘First Past the Post’ to declare a winner - the candidate who gets the most votes amongst the ballots cast is elected even if he/she gets less than 50% of the total votes cast.

The other choice in the referendum is called the ‘Single Transferrable Vote’, or STV. In a nutshell, instead of voting for just one candidate, you would be asked to vote for up to seven – and, rank them in order of preference. Then, computers would be needed to apply a formula whereby once a candidate had received 50% of the votes plus 1, all surplus votes would be applied to your second choice and so on until all seven candidates were elected. This system is in use in New Zealand and other countries around the world.

To me, it is confusing and unwieldy. It needs 60% to pass and last election the measure received 58% support. I think it will get less votes this election because voters have learned a bit more about it and are still confused by it.

We’ll see tonight how it goes, but I think the STV measure will fail and the Liberals will be the winners of the Provincial Election. Now, I’m off to vote!!