There are no ethical choices under first-past-the-post voting. We must instead make a decision that reduces the most harm.
this post was submitted on 05 May 2024
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It's frustrating for sure, I was even more annoyed when we had a referendum in BC and people opted to keep things the same.
Oof, yeah, thats pretty bad. As an Albertan, I definitely feel the pain of ignorant voters.
That was by design. BC used a FPTP voting system for the referendum, with multiple options for "which system would you prefer?" and no option for "I would prefer any of these over FPTP." So FPTP "won" while "Not FPTP" had their votes split.
I could be wrong but I remember voting and they actually had it split into two questions. The first was whether you wanted to keep the current system, and the second was if no what system would you prefer. Unfortunately people just decided to stick to what they were familiar with even if it's a flawed system.
EDIT: Double checked and yeah, it was two questions the first of which was whether the system should change or not. 61% of voters opted to keep the existing system. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2018_British_Columbia_electoral_reform_referendum