This past election has shown to us that our democracy is in need of extremely serious reform.

Between this past election and the one before it, electoral rules have changed. Voters are now required to provide identification in order to vote. Despite Election Canada’s best efforts to inform the public and various other people’s grassroots movements to get the word out, people were still unformed.

I’m pretty sure you have heard it too. “Bring your ID”, they say. What they all fair to say is to bring specific identification, since you will need to prove your name AND address, not just who you are.

Working as a poll clerk on voting day, I witnessed quite a few people who did not have proper identification. Those lucky enough to be able to drive (ie. have a driver’s license) bring those, and they can vote as a result. Those who don’t? Well, they bring in a whole bunch of other stuff, such as passports, citizenship cards, and the like.

Unfortunately, those pieces of identification alone do not work. They need something to prove their address, like a cable/power/phone bill. Most people don’t carry those things with them, so if they did not hear things correctly and just brought ID, they had to go home, find it, and come back to vote. That’s if they managed to find the time to do so; otherwise, they just left and did not vote.

Of course, one can always vouch for those without proper identification. However, there are limitations to that:

• You can only vouch for someone in the same polling division. In other words, people living in the same house (ie. spouses) or nearby (ie. neighbours).
• You can only vouch for one person.
• Those who got vouched for cannot vouch for anyone.

These limitations makes sense, but at the same time, not everyone will be going to the voting station with people they know AND in the same voting division.

Because of the new rules, we (my deputy returning officer and myself) had to turn back around two people. And in this election, with our broken system, every vote counts.

Which brings me to my next point. You may notice that I said we have a broken system of democracy. The reason is fairly simple; they way in which we elect our officials is unfair.

The current system, “first past the post” basically lets the person with the most votes in a riding win. In the case that quite a few ridings were in this election, this means those in tight races would only win with something significantly less that 50% of the people’s support in that riding.

What does this mean for democracy? In areas where people are split between different representatives, over half of the people there are not satisfied with the representative. If we truly are a democracy, then let there be proportional representation. I have absolutely no idea how we can get this to work, but perhaps we can make it so that we have multiple representatives per riding, based on the popular vote? Our representatives can work together to better represent our interests in the House of Commons, with one representative out of the whole lot of them going to Ottawa.

Speaking of the person we elect to Parliament, in the basics of democracy, we are voting in people who represent us best. All what I see from our wonderful brand of democracy is that we elect the person who is in the party who keeps our best interests at heart because MPs do not vote against the party line.

How does this hurt our interests? Let me bring up a very relevant example:

Let’s say the government tries to pass C-61. If I have a Conservative MP, then no matter what I say or do to oppose the bill, my MP will not listen to me because he/she will need to vote on party lines. This is absolutely ridiculous.

Democracy in Canada needs change. The current state of it is discouraging. In such an important time where there are many things going on in the world, we need to go out and vote for people who best represent us. Yet, we had the lowest voter turnout in Canadian history. We can look at these reasons I stated above as possible reasons why. From things like voting rules making it inconvenient for people to vote to not even getting their voices heard, the reasons are endless. Perhaps the Canadian public is starting to realize that our vote is worthless unless we have electoral reform and are not voting as a result.

Who knows? Maybe you can shed some light on this question.

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 16th, 2008 at 4:38 pm and is filed under Current Events, Politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.