Following the recent provincial election, leaders of all political parties lamented low voter turnout (41 percent). Politicians rightly concerned about low voter turnout should set out to fix the problem.

How

Like any good doctor or mechanic we first must determine the root cause of the problem before we prescribe a remedy.

Citizens, who didn't vote, did so for a reason. Likely they felt their vote would be wasted, their issue was not being addressed by current candidates and parties, they felt the Tories were going to win anyway or they frankly don't care.

The latter can't be addressed, but the former concerns can. But before we address that let's take two ideas off the table right now.

Compulsory voting, or fining those who do not vote, like they do in Australia is certainly not the answer. Representative democracy means people have the right to wilfully choose someone to represent them in government, not be forced to choose anyone to represent them. The only thing worse than a non-voter is a non-informed, non-caring voter.

Conversely, we should not consider paying citizens to vote. This practice was considered recently in Arizona. A group called "Arizonans for Voter Rewards" got enough signatures on a petition in 2006 to force a state-wide referendum as to whether one random voter should be awarded a $1-million prize, just for voting. Arizona voters smartly rejected this idea with 66 percent opposed.

The feeling of wasting a ballot was no doubt a strong reason for not voting. People who wanted to vote for a smaller party this election (Green, Wildrose Alliance, Communist), yet knew the likeliness of their candidate winning was very low may have stayed home on election day, rather than waste their time casting a ballot that never would impact the outcome.

A debate has been unfolding in Canada with regard to our first-past-the-post voting system whereby the winning candidate, but not the candidate with a majority of support, is elected. Almost without exception parties than gather 40 percent of the vote are "elected" with 100 percent of the power even though 60 percent of voters express other preferences. The two other schools of electing governments are majoritarian (or preferential ballot) and proportional.

The preferential ballot allows voters to rank candidates in order of preference. After the first choices are counted, if no candidate has 50 percent, the candidates with the least support are dropped and the ballots are again counted. This continues until one candidate has 50 percent of the vote.

This is the same system most commonly used by political parties to select leaders and candidates in Canada. It is used to elect members in Australia's lower house and for the French President.

The other voting system used by the vast majority of democracies in the world is proportional voting where - broadly - percentage of vote share is translated into percentage of seat share. Some systems allow one to vote for just the party (Netherlands) while others vote only for candidates (Ireland), still others have two votes, one for party and one for local candidate (New Zealand, Germany) and are referred to as "mixed system."

In all instances, no one can govern with a minority of votes and few votes are wasted because most voter preferences translate into representation in the legislature or parliament. British Columbians voted 57 percent in support of switching to a proportional single transferable vote system in a 2005 referendum (just short of the 60 percent requirement for passage).

Which brings us back to solutions. The British Columbia debate about voting systems was sparked in large part because of the 1996 election in which the governing party received considerable fewer votes than the opposition party. Go figure. It led to a randomly selected citizen's assembly which proposed an alternative. Perhaps 41 percent voter turnout in Alberta warrants its own review of how we vote in Alberta.

- Scott Hennig, Alberta Director & Troy Lanigan, National Director