A New Way to Vote in BC: STV?

The writ was dropped so everybody's gearing up for provincial elections in British Columbia. As we're going to be out of the province on May 17th, we've already completed our 'alternative absentee voting'.

As well as the general vote, there's a referendum on electoral reform. If the voters of British Columbia vote in favour of the new electoral system, government is required to introduce the legislation in sufficient time for the new electoral model to be in place for the May 2009 general election. If passed, instead of just marking one 'X', a voter may rank the candidates in order of their preference with a '1', '2', '3', and so on. The votes are then counted like this:

Single Transferable Vote Animation

There's not been lots of information about it and, unfortunately, surveys say that most voters don't know much about it. I think it's a worthy experiment in democracy. See what bloggers are saying.