How STV Fails Women and Minorities

Professor David Farrell of the University of Dublin, a world expert on voting systems, answers a question at the Ontario Citizen's Assembly on November 11, 2006 regarding the the efficacy of single transferable voting systems (STV) for representing women and minorities.

He acknowledges that STV is "the bottom of the heap" for electing women, and that closed list systems such as "mixed member proportional" (MMP) are far better at producing results that represent Canada's diverse population.

Professor Farrell was the author of "Electoral Systems: A Comparative Introduction", which was the textbook for both the Ontario and BC citizen's assemblies. Remarkably, this basic information about the shortcomings of STV at representing diversity was never clearly presented to the BC Citizen's Assembly.

Both Ireland and Malta, the only two countries that use STV nationally, have far worse records at electing women than "First Past the Post", the antiquated system we are seeking to replace in British Columbia.

His entire presentation can be viewed at: http://www.tvo.org/cfmx/tvoorg/citizensassembly/index.cfm?page_id=84&spot...

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