> You know, I had a rather long reply to this all written out, but forgot to fill out the "Name" field. When I hit back, the entire textarea was reset. Really annoying.

Kaz! was worried that would happen to me when I was writing the post that started this thread. He made me copy it all into a text file and save it every time I wanted to hit the preview button!

Maybe not a bad idea...

> Thanks for the well thought-out post. But I do have a few questions.

You're welcome :-)

> First, I still don't see what the advantage is between Ridings and States, as applied to the current political system in the United States. It seems the only differences are that the Ridings are [a] smaller and [b] more numerous. But still, looking back to your earlier comment about a state whose eastern half votes one way, contrary to the western half, couldn't this same thing happen in a Riding? Or is because this is on a smaller scale, it would be more accurate overall when looking at the size of a province?

There's one more advantage, (maybe) which is that ridings are [c] all about the same size. That means that compared to the United States, Canadian votes count about the same. A voter in our smallest province, Prince Edward Island, will still have more voting power than a voter in, say, Toronto (which he should, so that Prince Edward Island's 'voice' is heard in Parliament) -- but he will have less comparative power than an American voter from Rhode Island. (I don't know much about American geography, but I gather from Sam's prior comments that Rhode Island is a small American state.)

Which is better? It's kind of a tough question to answer -- you have to balance giving equal power to /people/ against giving equal power to /regions/. The United States selected one balance slightly more in favor of regions; Canada selected another, slightly more in favor of people.

The point of my post was to provide another electoral system that could be contrasted against the American system and that at the same time was /not/ the popular vote, since up to this point, all RinkDiscussions of Electoral College have /only/ compared the Electoral College to the popular vote. I believe that the Canadian system is sort of an in-between system, which has some advantages of the popular vote while still maintaining some advantages of Electoral College. I don't know that it's necessarily /better/ -- it depends on how you want people to be represented.

But to the issue at hand -- Yes, it's /possible/ for a riding to be split fifty-fifty, like the state I described above, but it's less /likely/, since people in a given riding all live in the same region and thus tend to share similar concerns. For example, I get the impression that people in large metropolitan areas tend (in general) to favor the Democrats in the United States, while people in less populous, rural areas tend to favor the Republicans. In Canada, rural areas are given a separate riding from urban areas. We take the concept even further -- people who live in the "wealthier" sections of town tend to have similar lifestyles and thus similar concerns, while people who live in the "older" sections of town also tend to have similar lifestyles and concerns which may be different from those in the wealthier sections. In Canada, the older sections of town are generally represented in separate ridings from the wealthier sections, and thus each section is heard. The vote may still be split in each section, but more often than not (I think) this is because the people have different views on which party is most trustworthy or which Prime Ministerial candidate is the better speaker or something along those lines. It is not as often because they have different visions of how the country should proceed into the future. (However, this is not always the case -- in both the older sections and wealthier sections of town, there are some households that contain families with young children, and some that do not; and families with young children often have different concerns than those that do not. However, it seems impossible to make any regional distinction that will represent these groups separately short of the popular vote.)

> What this sounds like, if applied on the southern side of the 49th parallel, is giving one electoral vote to each congressional district. Indeed, this will get the voting a lot closer to what the actual people represent, which begs the question "Why not have one vote per county/parish?" Which leads to "Why not one vote per person?"

I don't know what a "congressional district" is, but to answer the question "why not one vote per county/parish/person?", one need only look at Sam's posts in favor of Electoral College:

-Solidarity: The Electoral College eliminates votes for "silly" parties such as the Green party so that in most cases, the winner of an election will win by a larger margin. This is also the case with the Canadian system; "silly" votes tend to be disregarded because there are not enough to win any one riding. However, in the Canadian system, there /are/ occasional ridings that vote for independents or for third parties. This is a trade-off that we get for a system that comes closer to the popular vote than the American system; however, since there are very /few/ independent or third-party votes, and since the party that does win the election usually does by a very strong margin to form a majority government, we consider our system a success.

-Fewer minority governments or coalition governments (a similar issue); reducing the chaos in government. Again, the ridings provide a similar advantage, as we /usually/ end up with a majority government; again, though, since our system is closer to a popular vote there are majority governments occasionally and we need laws to deal with ineffective governments and to prevent chaos (such as the "vote of non-confidence" I described in my original post).

-Making sure politicians address the needs of the entire nation rather than just the regions containing most people. Again, all ridings count. There are more ridings than American states, so areas with more ridings tend to recieve more attention. Still, our political leaders do travel, and even areas with a few ridings are important as their few votes could make the difference in parliament. Other differences within our system (such as having candidates in /every/ riding) ensure that ridings in every part of the country are addressed.

-Either Sam or Orson Scott Card could do this better than me. Click on the link from my original post for more arguments; most of them also hold for ridings.

Again, each country, including Canada and the United States need to find a balance between regional and personal representation. Canada selected one balance; the United States selected another. Each balance has its own advantages and disadvantages; each country has its own way of dealing with the disadvantages. As I've stated, Canada's system seems to fall somewhere between the American system and the popular vote; it has some advantages of the American system and also some advantages of the popular vote. Put another way, there is somewhat /more/ chaos and /less/ solidarity in Canada than in America, but also more personal representation.

The statesmen who decided on Canada's electoral system obviously felt that the chaos allowed by this system would at least be managable. So far, it has worked at least tolerably well!

> In application to the current American system of government (with the executive and legistlative branches separated), it seems that Ridings would be a benefit in that they're [a] smaller, and [b] more numerous. However, we then get back to a loss of a state's identity in a national election (which I'm still not convinced would be a bad thing).

If you're saying that the fact that a state votes together is part of what unifies a state together /as/ a state, then that's, well, interesting, and certainly we don't have that in Canada. In fact, I hadn't thought about it that way before!

Often, however, Canadian Prime Ministerial candidates address the people of a specific province, because people in each provinces might have similar needs, and because it's easier to address whole provinces than individual ridings. In that sense, the fact that provinces aren't bound together because they don't vote together is less important than the fact that the people in those provinces may have similar concerns, and therefore even though the vote is divided up in each province the /people/ in those provinces are not divided up by the vote.

In fact, because every region in the province will get a vote, one might argue that the Canadian system /reduces/ strife in each province. For example, the Albertan farmers don't have to argue with the city-dwellers about which priorities are important and which way Alberta should vote; each segment of the population gets its own say.

> Now on to the second question.
>
> Are Ridings fixed in place, or can the boundaries be redrawn, much the way how congressional districts in the United States can be? For instance, if Edmonton Southwest sees more working-class Edmontonians moving in, would Edmonton Southwest and Edmonton Southeast be redefined or would Edmonton Southwest just eventually become a Riding of working-class Edmontonians?

Monkeyman did as good a job answering this as I could hope to!

> -Faux "congratulations on winning the Longest Forum Post Award" Pas

-Spacebar