On Jul 3, 2004, at 1:17 PM, Gregg Iverson wrote:
> No complaint if a minority win? Notice the complaints generated
> because the electorial college "picked" a president who had a (very
> slight) minority.
Some people complain about this but it's a bit different in Canada.
Remember, we don't vote for the prime minister, we vote for a local
representative of a party. The party with the most seats forms the
government while the other parties form the opposition, the leader of
that party becomes the prime minister.
> How does one get the most votes but not the largest percentage of
> votes? I can understand getting the most votes but not a majority of
> votes.
The candidate got the largest percentage of votes, it just happened to
be only 30% of the vote because there were a number of different
parties running candidates in that riding. Here's the breakdown for
that particular riding from elections canada
(http://www.elections.ca/content.asp?
section=ele&document=59024&dir=38e/resval&lang=e&textonly=false):
Jennifer Burgis
New Democratic Party
13,763
Andrew Lewis
Green Party of Canada
10,662
Gary Lunn
Conservative Party of Canada
22,050
Mary Moreau
Independent
214
David Mulroney
Liberal Party of Canada
17,082
Total number of validated votes:
63,771
As you can see, there were 5 candidates in this riding, 4 of which
received a large number of votes. The Conservative candidate received
the largest number (and percentage) of votes but not the majority of
votes. As I stated previously, this is one of the criticisms of the
Canadian political system in that our representation does not always
represent the way the majority (or even a large minority) of people
voted. Proportional representation (wherein the seats assigned more
closely match the percentage of votes the different parties received)
has been one proposed solution to this.
Andrew "Frugal" Dacey
frugal@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
http://www.tildefrugal.net/
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