Originally posted on my (now-defunct) WordPress blog

The sporadic blog returns! This installment has been a long time coming, partly because of all of the beautiful maps. They’re worth it, I promise. When we left the wonderful and weird world of Proportionalia and its Dual Member Proportional (DMP) voting system, we’d just explored some of its more interesting quirks using some highly contrived examples. In creating these, I was helped along by some janky MATLAB/Octave scripts I knocked up to do all the calculations nice and quickly; the plan in the future is to upload these for public consumption. After plenty of necessary sanitiation. It may never happen. (Update from 2024: it never did — L)

Originally posted on my (now-defunct) WordPress blog

I’m back! It’s been a while since the last installment of political nerdery, so I’ll start with a catch-up of some mildly interesting news from the last month. Firstly, a referendum on the voting system in the Canadian province of Prince Edward Island was met with an overwhelming “meh”, with a mixed member proportional system narrowly losing out to the status quo amid abysmal turnout. Ironically enough, if it had been a first-past-the-post election the new system would have won, as it won in more ridings! Thankfully the result wasn’t interpreted as a generational block on any more change, but rather an opportunity for further discussion.

Originally posted on my (now-defunct) WordPress blog

Throughout November 2018, British Columbia held a postal referendum on changing the electoral system from our favourite first-past-the-post (FPTP), and one of the options was a system nobody had ever heard of before: DMP, or dual member proportional representation. The people of BC ended up being tricked into voting to keep the status quo for reasons beyond the scope of this blog, but the whole process got me thinking about this mysterious new system. Although the horse has bolted, settled down, raised a family, sent its kids off to college, held its grandchildren and taken a one-way trip to a glue factory in Switzerland, the stable door is still open and it looks untidy.