My take on the BC-STV Campaign.

On Tuesday, one of the greatest democratic exercises in Canadian history came to a less than satisfactory ending. Despite raising over $300,000 and signing up 5000 new supporters, the campaign to bring a fair electoral voting system to British Columbia was shut down when 61% of voters put an ‘x” next to keeping our current first past the post system.

Events out of our control.

A lot of the setback was outside of our control and some of it was our responsibility. There are a lot of people or things we can try to blame, because in the wake of a loss it is very easy to try and find individuals or circumstances that we can externalize our disappointment onto. I don’t think there is any single item that threw off our campaign, nor is there any evidence that a perfectly run campaign could have gotten us over the illusive and undemocratic 60% threshold set by the government, but like any adventure there is a story to be told and a lesson to be learnt.

To begin with, we have to look at which items were outside of the control of the BC-STV campaign. From the beginning, we were at a disadvantage because we were promoting a system that had an academic name (STV or Single Transferable Vote) that was unfamiliar to most voters and that was easy to make fun out of. In the United States they call the system, ranked choice, and in most places they just call it proportional representation. (MMP is nearly as bad of a name, since again it lacks resonance.) We probably should have focussed more on “electoral reform” which we did some of our final TV ads. In 2004, the Citizens’ Assembly narrowly decided against calling the system “voters’ choice”, mainly because they wanted their choice to be transparent. A different name might have made a difference.

The first referendum was an easier campaign. Very little opposition was present, each household actually had a copy of the Citizens’ Assembly final report sent to them so they could read it for themselves, the question was simple, and the province had sat through four years of one of the greatest distorted result in Canadian history. As a result, in 2005, we received 58% of the vote.

In the four years that followed, new external factors came about that created some systematic disadvantages to the campaign. Shortly after the 2005 election, the government announced that it was having a second referendum. Rather than running a neutral information campaign, the government decided to equally fund the proponents and opponents of the change, while maintaining the 60% quota. This provided opponents of electoral reform a comfortable $500,000 mass media propaganda campaign, while the STV proponent would be tasked with running an information campaign. The government also changed the question away from a simple yes and no question to one which was much longer, and arguably made it harder to run a simple message for the campaign. At first, the government announced that the referendum would happen in November 2008, so it coincided with the municipal elections. This would have allowed the referendum to take place separate from the provincial election and would have created a less partisan atmosphere and promised near immediate results to the changes. However, concerns from Elections BC about the timeline to implement the changes and the government delayed it to once again coincide with the May 12 election.

Probably the biggest blow to the campaign came in August 2007, when the BC Electoral Boundaries Commission drew up the new borders for both the STV maps and the planned redistricting of the current boundaries. Because of shifting population centers, (sizable growth in urban areas and decline in rural areas), the EBC was faced with eliminating at least 3 rural ridings, greatly expanding the seat count, or possibly violating the Canadian Charter by maintaining a much lower voter per MLA ratio in rural ridings. The EBC’s preliminary report recommended removing 3 seats. A huge public outcry came from the rural areas and the government responded by introducing legislation which would essentially forced the EBC to increase the seats, and a new map was drawn. The BC-STV maps were quickly reworked to correspond to the new plurality districts.

This incident put the pro-STV campaign in a tough spot. We were keenly aware that we would have to accept and stand behind whatever BC-STV districts were put forward, as whatever they recommended would now be part of the package put forward to voters in the referendum. We could not come out against the boundaries, and then expect to campaign in favor of them a few months later. This incident also created a lingering perception in the public’s mind that STV would remove local representation which we could never quite shake.

When the EBC finally released their final report, the new boundaries for both STV and SMP districts were tucked in appendix p, and it was clear that they were not developed in very methodical way. STV proponents were faced with an awkward map that threw Kamloops, Quesnel, Merrit, Princeton in 5 seat district that stretched from the BC border to the edge of Prince George. The Okanagan was split into two STV districts that cut Kelowna in half. The Kootenays-Columbia district was put in a new four seat district, and Powell River and the Sunshine Coast was put into a district that included two thirds of Vancouver Island. From a mathematical point of view, the new map would allow for a very proportional results, but from a practical point of view, it would remove local representation in areas which would have quite easily benefited from a 2 or 3 member STV district such as the Cariboo and the Kootenays. The new maps were likely the number one campaign fodder the opposition had, and they were an achilles tendon that our campaign never overcame. At a later point in the campaign, we would find ourselves spending added money in rural areas to try and counter the perception that local seats would be lost without any net gain.

Another contributing factor to the loss was the climate under which the election occurred. The previous election happened in rosier economic times, and in the midst of a better publicized election which saw a much higher voter turnout. The economic turmoil this time around certainly scared some voters this time around into rejecting change, particularly as the main campaign messages were essentially a “keep the status-quo” election and the NDP and Green Parties ran campaigns that failed to excite progressive voters. The failed federal coalition attempt in December likely turned some conservative voters off of a system that would increase minority coalitions. It is hard to put a quantitative measure on how this affected voters, but it is arguably enough to tone down the British Columbian tendency to reject the status quo and embrace populist measures. In 2005, for instance, the federal government was still in the hands of the Martin Liberals, and thus electoral reform was still on the minds of the “west wants in” crowd.

One of the overlooked stories of this election is that the election was a overshadowed by a massive outbreak of a disease known by as “Canucks Fever.” In 2005, a hockey strike effectively negated this as a distraction. However, in 2009, the Canucks were the predominant media story of the month, pushing election coverage to the number two story in coffee rooms and on news broadcasts. The unfortunate elimination of the Canucks from the playoffs the night before voting began ensured that the election effectively became a page 3 story. This, likely more than any other single factor, ensured voter turnout reached historic lows (dropping nearly 10%) and certainly caused damage to the prospects of both STV and progressive parties in the election. Early in the night, when the Green Party results showed them polling under 9%, it was clear evidence that young voters were not coming out as the Greens should have been well within the 11-12% range with turnout as usual scenarios.

The Campaign

Reaching 4 million voters in a modern election campaign is expensive and certainly not easy. Whereas the two main political parties each spent over 5 million dollars each on their campaigns, the STV proponents and opponents were given $500,000 each to reach as many voters. (Plus, STV had to get over 60% of the vote.)

This meant that the proponents had only around 15 cents per voter to do outreach, run an information campaign, and counter any negative messages. This meant that tough strategic decisions would have to be made on how to run the campaign on a limited budget. I’m not sure if we ever had enough resources to win the campaign, but I feel some different decisions could have had the results closer.

We knew our opponents did not plan on having any volunteers on the ground, and would be using most of their money on FUD (fear, uncertainty, and doubt) advertisements on tv and in print.

While new mediums such as the web have made it easier for people to find information, in an over saturated media universe, less than one in ten voters turn to the web for their voting information and so mass media campaigns are still essential to reach voters. (Our web site received nearly 100k views over the course of the campaign.)

Some of us thought the best way to counter the ‘no’ campaign would be to deliver a comprehensive package to each household and focus our efforts on reaching voters door-to-door early while utilizing earned media to reach the masses. However, an early decision to hold back most of our funds to counter the opponents media campaign left our ground organization chronically under funded and our volunteers periodically waiting for new materials. Instead of plotting a successful campaign for ourselves, I think there was more of a ‘play defense’ and hold onto our 2005 numbers attitude amongst our decision makers.

Successful referendum campaigns are so rare in Canada, that it is very difficult to reference an established winning strategy and it is unfair to blame anyone for making decisions in good faith even if they ended up with a disappointing result. While I was not partial to the decision making process at the center of the campaign, I know that from the beginning there was always a wide difference in opinions on how the campaign was to be run. Some people are passionate about TV and radio, as they tend to be one of the more effective ways of moving voters in traditional campaigns. Others are big into facts and figures and felt the argument could be won in the media. Some liked grassroots decision making, and others wanted a smaller campaign structure. In the end, the bulk of the resources were spent on TV and radio, with no newspaper and less than 10% coverage of the province with literature.

The TV advertisements were excellent, done by an experienced company called FD Element, and they hit on the right themes, but without backup media in print to address objections, the campaign never seemed to grab enough traction amongst voters.

Messaging was also a concern throughout the campaign. One of the internal challenges we had was coming up with a campaign slogan and created a tight message box. Because we were afraid of offending conservative voters, we held back on using the term “proportional representation” and slogans such as “every vote counts.” It was some of these internal discussions that went unresolved early on and left the campaign far behind schedule. Constant fights over slogans meant that the end result would be watered down to avoid offending any section of society, and as such also created an ambiguous campaign statement that may not have raised enough excitement.

It was well into 2009 before a slogan was chosen and signs and materials were printed en masse.

In the end, a decision was made to go with “power up your vote” to emphasize the idea that it would empower the average voters. Shortly before we chose that, I had submitted a messaging document that contained a variety of slogans and simple sign designs. One of the poster ideas had a picture of “superman” with the slogan “empower voters”, and it was from that the main campaign slogan arose. It was not my main choice for a campaign slogan (it was more designed for a fun poster) as it was pretty vague, but by that point it seemed to be either accept the compromise or get bogged down with slogans that did not make sense to anyone outside of the electoral reform movement or face further delays. Unfortunately, at that point we went almost immediately to print signs and materials, before the results of our first round of focus testing came back in. (After waiting months for a slogan, we had half of our material to print within in a day and most of them lacked even a basic description of what STV actually was.) The poll showed that the fairness argument had the most traction. Some of the omissions on materials I can take responsibility for, but I don’t think that a different slogan, color scheme, or messaging would have substantially altered the results at the late stage in the game. Had we had a clearer message and earlier exposure, we may have been able to build up enough momentum.

One of the problems is that the board of directors of Fair Voting BC and the communications committee wanted to retain as much control over the messaging as possible. Instead of bringing in communications professionals early on find a slogan or message that worked for people with no knowledge of anything STV, the board sometimes got caught up in arguments that had little to do with winning the election and were more suitable to an academic debate. There was also an ongoing internal conflict between some members of the Citizens’ Assembly who felt that they should be the focus of the campaign, and others who felt that we should focus on how electoral reform would affect the average voter. Instead of looking for outside help to resolve our differences, many of the decisions went around in circles and decisions were put off until far too late. At one point, I had suggested using our grassroots support base as an extended focus test for messaging and tried to recruit some experienced communications professionals, but this did get approved by the board. Instead of building a team early on and creating a strong capacity, there was insular aspect to many of the campaign decisions which lead to endless frustration.

I think many of the campaign mistakes could have been avoided with a different internal organization to our group, but that is much easier said than done. It is rare for an organization to have the finesse and synergy of an Obama-Plouffe-Axelrod lineup, and unlike a political party, we did not have the benefit of having a single leader who could sign of on decisions. When we brought on a campaign manager in January, we never fully gave them the decision making ability which they needed, nor a mandate to build a successful ground campaign. We did not commit enough resources to bring on an experienced political campaign manager early in the campaign, and as such we never committed to, nor executed, a full campaign plan at an early enough state.

This ended up causing frustrations with missed deadlines, often incomplete communications lines between those on the ground and those responsible for decisions, and delays in implementing necessary decisions. These problems were not particular to the campaign, most small organizations, political parties, NGOs, and many businesses have the same internal problems. When you are under capacity, understaffed, or faced with an internal dispute, it is very easy to let your larger objectives be obscured by smaller issues. Most campaigns suffer from some sort of disarray, and it is very rare to find the winning team unless you have the resources to hire professionals or have the right people on from the beginning. And of course, even then there is no guarantee that a campaign will be successful, as many well oiled campaigns have found themselves making simple mistakes that came back to haunt them. Ask Hillary Clinton about under appreciating caucus states, or Rudy Giuliani about skipping an early primary.

If there is one lesson to learn from internal organization, I would highly suggest that any future campaign avoid death by committee. I define a committee as a group of individuals who will be unable to commit to something. Instead, ensure that each area of operations has someone clearly responsible for it and the people responsible have a clear understanding of their mission and their objectives. Create an organization with a proper two way communications so that everyone can be on the same page and create a proper external dispute mechanism so that disagreements can be quickly resolved.

Again, easier said than done.

There was a lot of things that I personally wanted to do different and tried hard to push the campaign to do which might (or might not have) tipped the results in our favour within the bad economic climate, distracted electorate, and with the poor STV maps.

The first thing I tried to push for were a few pre-election campaign pushes. Way back at least two years, I was trying to push my colleagues on the board to build up a series of pre-election campaigns so we could create an engaged volunteer force and build internal capacity long in advance. While I had some support on the board, it was never substantial enough to get the ball rolling. I had put forward plans to push electoral reform at a civic level, and create a strong petition drive to fight against the illegitimate 60% threshold, but these were both turned down by other members of our board at the time.

As early as last year, I was trying to get a commitment to get signs, t-shirts, and other aspect publicly available, but to sell them as method of sustaining our operations, developing a grassroots volunteers network, and gathering early momentum. I signed a contract with the board to do fundraising, but could never get a commitment from the board to produce adequate amounts of collateral. When they were produced, they were basically given away, essentially created no mechanism for growth or value for what we were producing. Instead of getting adequate numbers of signs out to supporters in the fall, it wasn’t until late march of 2009 that we finally gave our supporters a means of showing their support. Our scarcity of materials made it very difficult for us to create a proper canvassing team, and we ended up leaving volunteer teams without real tasks to do. One of the mistakes was to treat our organization like a typical partisan campaign and save all of our resources for the last minute, when we needed to build up a huge ground organization and prepare the public for a last minute misinformation campaign.

I personally though it was extremely important to put together a comprehensive package of information and deliver it to each door step. As our budget was constrained, I had suggested we do it in newsprint form (which can be done for a few pennies each), and try to rely on volunteers to get out as many as possible.

There were a few objectives to this, one would be to pre-address a few of the major concerns that we knew people would have, such as loss of local representation, how the counting works, and some of our opponents key criticisms in advance of their campaign. A combination of clear FAQ, some good illustrations on how STV counted votes, and a few personal testimonies could have made the case quite well. (Facts tell, stories sell!) At that point, we already had a lot of key endorsements from across the political spectrum lined up (the Preston Manning/David Suzuki combo was my favourite), so we also had enough ammunition to show that this was a citizen led initiative but had support from a lot of well respected community figures. I hoped such a piece could at least assist us in alerting voters to the upcoming referendum, setting the messaging early on our side and generally informing the public, while at the same time giving our volunteers an easy way to spread information.

I wanted to hit up our high support areas first, and cascade slowly into lower support areas towards the end of the campaign. This could helped us both with fundraising and supporter build up, and could leave us with a greater capacity first. I hoped we could get enough information on it to give to ensure people had the details in front of them, so whether or not they read it, they would at least feel comfortable knowing they could resort to it.

Unfortunately, I could never get enough acceptance to get this piece off the ground and a similar idea was tossed around by the editor of a local alternative monthly magazine, but I think he soured people to the idea by pushing it as an insert into his magazine and the campaign executive declined.

Essentially, because of our decision not to create and disseminate an information package, we had nothing to provide the average voter with. Seniors, and many other computer illiterate voters had essentially no way of understanding what this referendum was about or finding information on what STV is. While we had cool looking propaganda, we had nothing en masse to answer people’s questions or handle their objections. Internally, there was even an objection to telling people about the counting process, which resulted in many of our volunteers having no simple way of explaining how STV worked. Instead, some voters were told to trust the Citizens’ Assembly and ignore the math. Imagine walking into a car showroom, and having a sales person unwilling to tell you what engine was in the car or what the compression was. The average car buyer may not fully understand how their engine works, but they certainly don’t want to be told that it is irrelevant and to trust the engineers. As a result, when our opponents began using “its complicated” as a key message, voters essentially had no choice but to believe them. Had we provided voters with a clear explanation of STV and the count, I think the average voter would have felt insulted with an argument that implied they were unable to figure it out. Or at least we could have preempted many of the ridiculous misconceptions that were going on. (You may never know where your vote went, you would have to rank all candidates, your vote would go to someone you didn’t like, etc.)

Another item which I pushed for was to use autodialing technology to identify supporters and to expand our volunteer force early on. We actually had a contract with a company in December to do a call out of 3 test ridings to measure the effectiveness of this. Additionally, at an organizing conference in January, we had a professional campaign manager in to talk about the effectiveness of putting our resources into supporter identification and ground organizing because $500,000 doesn’t buy an effective TV campaign, but unfortunately, most of the board sat out his presentation.

However, miscommunications and disagreements led to this project being postponed until under two weeks left in the campaign, at which point it was too late to effectively use the results. More so, instead of going with a simple electoral reform pitch and supporter identification, a multipart script was used that would have listeners navigate through a set of multiple question sets, effectively resulting in a low rate of response. Had we done this earlier and better, we could have filled in gaps in our ground organization, and created a much broader supporter basis.

There were other aspects of our campaign that I would have liked to have seen different. As I implied earlier, I would probably have skipped the TV advertisements all together (they are effective for a better funded campaign, but ate up our budget quickly) and focussed on getting literature out to every door step, and using newspaper and radio more effectively, probably as a way to showcase our endorsements. We ran some early radio advertisements, that may have done our campaign more harm than good. They claiming that political insiders were trying to trick us into rejecting STV, instead of promoting the concept of change. I think they probably confused listeners more than they help swing them to our side.

We also skipped traditional print altogether, meaning that those who still gathered their information from the newspapers, were left with exposure only to our opponents advertising.

Another item I tried to convince our campaign executive to do was to put a GOTV message on some of the more popular rock radio stations on the day before the election campaign. While I don’t think we wanted to spend a lot of money on younger demographics to convince them that STV was a better system, I think the notion of electoral reform would have been enough to get new voters to the polls if a simple, edgy, vote for reform tomorrow message was put onto the radio. Instead, we assumed that our facebook and internet outreach would be good enough, which from the low voter turnout was obviously not the case.

Of course, there is no guarantee that these activities would have changed the course of the campaign or the result. We could have run a perfect campaign and still failed to get 50%, let alone 60%.

Despite our difficulties, we still had a lot of success. A large ground network came together from each region of the province let by excellent regional coordinators and dedicated volunteers who put their lives on hold to work on this campaign. We gathered an impressive array of endorsements and brought together people from across the political spectrum to support change. We had a last minute fundraising push which allowed us to improve our media coverage.

I remember one time we were frustrated with a local editorial we saw online, only to find that the front page featured an full page picture of our volunteers putting up signs.

Our website was great thanks to the team at Agentic and featuring FD Element’s videos, and our campaign dominated the internet (for those who searched for bc-stv). The Christy Clark video of her endorsement was amongst the top Canadian political videos of the year, our main group on facebook gathered over 6000 supporters, and our bloggers dominated twitter.

Our campaign team distributed 14,000 lawn signs, nearly 250,000 flyers, 14,000 buttons, 4000 stickers, and 500 T-Shirts to over 20 local coordinators.

The speakers were amazing, doing hundreds of events across the province and we had great events and wonderful public outreach during the came. I think we can all be proud of the work we did, and the progress we made.

MOVING FORWARD

I think electoral reform is far from dead and the general atmosphere on the ground wants to see some major changes. We may still see full proportional representation gather steam at the federal level and in places like Quebec which have not yet gone through their attempt at change. If a federal election occurs, and the Liberals and NDP vote is enough to form a coalition, we may see proportional representation put on the table as part of a governing package. The exclusion of the Green Party and over rewarding of the Bloc keeps fair voting on the federal stage. Additionally, the Conservatives’ Senate reform legislation as previously put forward, would have use a Single Transferable Vote to determine Senate Elections, and would have resulted in semi-proportional senate if term limits were introduced.

However, I think there may also be a need for electoral reformer supporters to occasionally step back from the push for full PR, to embrace measures that may achieve less perfection, but greater public support.

While there is a strong appetite in the public for electoral reform, and for giving disenfranchised voters a voice, the results in BC, PEI, and Ontario have set back provincial PR initiatives and given supporters of the status quo ammunition for delaying reforms or ignoring public demands. It it also likely we could see a constant cycle of failed referendums if we insist on only holding out for full proportional representation. While voters empathize with the desire for change, there is also a constant fear of change that can make the push harder. Voters are afraid of small parties holding the balance of power, they are afraid of losing representation, and there is a huge portion of the public that supports parties which are over rewarded and are afraid of rocking the boat. Sometimes, we may have to look at incremental changes instead of dooming ourselves to no changes.

Instead of looking at only full PR models, we may need to entertain models that may be more familiar to voters and have less changes. For instance, in Australia, using essentially the same constitutional framework as Canada, they use an instant run off vote (essentially single member STV) for their legislative assembly, and then have a second group of representatives (an executive council) that are elected using proportional representation. The second group of representatives is smaller in numbers. While this system still has flaws including promoting false majorities and distorting seat counts in the lower house, it also removed some of the worst problems with our current electoral system, mainly it ensure each representative has a true majority of support, it removed ‘strategic’ and fear based voting that often turns off a huge amount of voters by insisting they vote against their own interests to keep out the lesser of two evils. The inclusion of a PR system also ensures that every voter has a voice in government, even if parties are not fully rewarded for their vote percentage. For instance, a 20 seat PR component could give smaller parties a single seat for every 5% of the vote.

Another variation would be to return to two member legislative districts in BC, like they had until 1991, but using an STV mechanism to replace them, and then combine it with a second PR house. This would preserve local representation, while also reducing the polarization in the legislative assembly and would make it future for areas to opt in to full STV. However, it may be easier to keep the proposal simple and tackle the key problems with decline first, while tackling balanced regional representation at a later point.

Either may be an acceptable compromise, in that mainstream voters can still be assured that cheques and balances exist and fundamental structures of representation that they have become accustomed to will remain, while promising disenfranchised voters at least marginal representation. For many fundamental supporters of proportional representation, this may feel like an unacceptable compromise, but the pursuit of perfection has doomed many good intentions.

There are other good reasons for looking at a dual chamber government for provinces (and federally as well.) One is that the Canadian Constitution already describes an executive council belonging to the provinces appointed by the Lieutenant Governors so this arguably does not require any fundamental changes to the constitution to achieve some degree or balance. Secondly, as members of this council would run as a team, they could free up some of the key ministers (the premier, finance minister, attorney general, etc) from constituent duties so as to ensure that their time never has to be divided between constituent work and their executive duties. This would also remove the cabinet ministers from inherent conflicts of interest when they may make decisions that could have a negative or positive impact on their community. Thirdly, a separate executive could allow a more dynamic provincial government. It could help attract higher caliber candidates who may not be interested in local politics, but could be an essential component of a provincial cabinet. It would also allow a distinction between voting directly for a local MLA and voting for a party to govern which would improve local accountability by allowing voters to oppose a local candidate while supporting an executive.

Another aspect for supporters of STV to pursue, is to try and get municipal governments to adopt variations of it. Municipal changes require a lot less risk since they are already dealing with multimember districts and STV would be a true fit. I certainly prefer the name “choice voting” instead of STV and now that the door has closed on BC-STV, I hope that others can begin using the more qualitative terminology.

This is but one possibility of pushing through reforms, but it is quite clear something must be one to reverse declining voters turnout and re-engage voters. Embarrassing voter turnout and a general feeling of disenfranchisement is a genuine risks not only to the electoral process, but civic responsibility and social inclusion in general.

Other measures, such as lowering the voting age, publicly funding provincial parties in return for banning non-personal donations, and more Citizens’ Assembly’s should also considered to help reengage voters.

IN CONCLUSION.

I think there is a lot to be learn from this campaign, and am genuinely disappointed at the results as I spend a great portion of the last 5 years of my life trying to better our democracy. That being said, I met many great people who passionately believed in electoral reform and saw first hand the passion of many volunteers who genuinely believed in changing politics for the better. As always, there is no such think in life as failure, only frustrations and learning experiences we can build on and improve. As long as we have single member pluralities, there will be no such thing as a bored electoral reformer.