Democracy's foes reveal themselves
Came to work at Democracy Central this afternoon to find that the group who will be campaigning against the multi-partisan, independent and representative Citizens' Assembly's recommendation for a mixed-member proportional voting system for Ontario have revealed themselves.
Not surprisingly, it was with a press release cross-posted to Jason Cherniak's blog (who I did get the pleasure to meet briefly this past weekend and seems like a nice guy).
My friend and leading pro-democracy blogger Scott Tribe responded with a blistering and accurate attack on the flimsy logic of the No MMP campaign.
The discussion in the comments on those blogs is interesting and should be reflective of how the campaign will develop should the No MMP forces continue to try and peddle misrepresentations and half-truths as their stock in trade.
I'm sure we'll be pointing out the glaring holes in the case against MMP in the weeks to come but I want to concentrate briefly on one point in the release to refute it.
No MMP warns the proposed voting system "will allow political leaders to stack their caucuses with blind loyalists who have no direct responsibility to the people." Let's consider this scenario of the 2011 election under MMP.
As proposed by the Citizens' Assembly, parties are required to publicly release their candidate lists - and how they were chosen - before the writ is dropped. Obviously, on the day list must be made public, the media will be ALL over that story. They'll talk about the list order, break down the regional and demographic representativeness of the list and let voters know how the list was chosen. Do you think a party would risk all the negative publicity that would come from having to admit that the list was selected by the leader in a smoky backroom? Not if they want to win the election. Because they know that the other parties would be criticizing them like crazy if they did that.
Also, the 3% threshold for winning seats under MMP provides a strong incentive for parties to be fair and transparent with their members when it comes to list selection. After all, if a party were to choose its candidates in an undemocratic way, it would be easy for an enterprising party activist to quickly start their own party, with fair and democratic candidate selection processes, and directly compete with their former party for votes based upon their more democratic nature. Heck, they might even be able to call it the Democratic Liberal/PC/NDP/Green party!
So as you're hopefully starting to see, all this talk about list MPPs is not based in reality but is just an attempt to scare voters away from a new and improved voting system.
And this isn't even starting to criticize the problems with undemocratic candidate selection under our current voting system, as this blogger points out.
4 comments:
Good arguments, be intersting to see if the anti-democratic anti-MMP faction have the ability to respond with arguments rather than simple fear-mongering.
The Ontario MMP takes democracy one giant step closer to the citizen, and this is a very good thing in this country. A more transparent, more open democracy is not to be feared, except by those who wish to thrive in a brokered-politics system.
Let us support the proposed MMP, because it gives more power to the voter, take power away from the political brokers.
Absolutely, I blogged essentially what you stated in Jason's blog. If we can shot holes so easily into their fear-mongering logic, the public is not daft.
The NO MMP campaign is based upon the public being daft.
Politics and democracy can be ugly sometimes, but I think we can make history if the arguments develop the way they have been on the blogosphere.
In the end it will boil down to which campaign has the sexier ads.
But only slightly more seriously...
It's a good sign that in just one day, all of the No's points were blown out of the water, as being flaws existing in the current FPTP system, and easily solvable for MMP.
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