Veggie-lovers in Squamish may be inclined to vote for electoral reform in Tuesday's referendum, while meat-eaters may prefer keeping things as they are - and either way, seafood fans are left out in the cold.
Those are the preliminary results from The Chief's "Pick Your Pizza" election simulation, which allowed local voters to vote for a variety of pies using both the current first-past-the-post (FPTP) electoral system and the proposed Single Transferable Vote (STV) system.
Voters got to choose their pizzas from three different groups - Veggie, Carnivore and Oceano - to represent political parties. In the FPTP ballot, they could vote for one pizza (one from each group) in their geographic area. On the STV ballot, they could rank all nine pizzas in order of preference.
A total of 23 local residents cast ballots in the poll. In the FPTP ballot, Carnivores won in two of the three geographic areas, with Veggies winning the third. However, adding all the FPTP ballots together, Veggie-lovers had 10 votes to nine for the Carnivores, with the Oceano pizzas getting a total of four votes. In other words, the Veggies, with 43 per cent of the voters, got 33 per cent of their desired type of pizza, while the Carnivores, representing 39 per cent of voters, got 66 per cent of their type of pizza.
That's a similar result to the 1996 provincial election, where the BC Liberals won 42 per cent of the popular vote across the province to the NDP's 39 per cent, but the NDP won a majority government.
In the STV ballot, on the other hand, Veggie-lovers won two out of the three pizzas, with a Carnivore pizza as the third choice, meaning Veggie lovers got 66 per cent of the pizza choices in the STV ballot with 58 per cent of the total first-place votes, while Carnivores got 33 per cent of the pizza choices with 42 per cent of the total first-place votes.
The Oceano pizzas - our "third-party" representative - were shut out on both ballots, with their four votes - 17 per cent of the total - getting no pizzas in the FPTP ballot. In the STV ballot, literally nobody picked an Oceano pizza first, which meant they were the first to be eliminated.
The STV simulation went through a total of eight rounds of calculating ballots and redistributing votes to other choices to pick the winners. In the end, only two of the three pizzas made the quota required to be elected, while the third pizza chosen was the one with the most votes remaining after others had been eliminated mathematically.
The STV results were tabulated by hand and also fed through an STV computer simulator provided by Barrodale Computing Services for verification. (See www.barrodale.com/bcstv/ for details on how the simulation works.)
