First-Past-the-Post Ignores Half the Voters: Our current voting system is technically called Single Member Plurality (colloquially known as First-Past-the-Post, or FPTP). With FPTP, a province or country is divided up into electoral districts (typically called ridings in Canada), and at most one candidate from each party, as well as independent candidates, run in each riding. Voters get to cast a single vote for one of the candidates, and the candidate with the most votes wins the riding. Because of this, only those voters who vote for the winning candidate in a riding end up having their views represented in parliament or the legislature. Effectively, the other voters' views are ignored. In the Canadian context, typically just over half the voters end up without their views represented by an elected representative.
The Need for Multi-Member Districts (MMDs): To ensure that most voters end up with a representative whose political views reflect their own, we need to use a voting mechanism that allows neighbouring voters with different political views to each contribute to electing a different MP or MLA. The most common way to do this around the world is by using multi-member districts, or MMDs.
How to Make MMDs: The simplest way to create an MMD is simply to group several adjacent ridings together and to elect several MPs or MLAs from the combined electoral district. For example, the city of Vancouver currently elects 6 MPs. In the 2025 election, the Liberal Party's candidates won approximately 50% of the vote, the Conservative Party's candidates 30%, and the NDP's candidates 20%, but this gave the Liberals 4 seats, the NDP 2, and the Conservatives 0. However, we could easily imagine creating a six-member electoral district, in which case it would have been very likely that the Liberals would have won 3 seats, the Conservatives 2, and the NDP 1. This outcome would have much more closely reflected how Vancouver voters actually voted and ensured representation in Parliament of the diversity of political views voters hold.
Voting systems that use some form of multi-member districts are broadly known as proportional voting systems (often referred to as proportional representation). Click on the tabs below to learn more about the two main types of proportional voting systems: those based on MMDs and those based on top-up (compensatory) seats.
The most common systems that rely principally on MMDs are known as List systems because in most countries that use them (e.g., in the Scandinavian countries, in Austria, in the Netherlands, and in many others), voters are given lists of candidates put up by each party and cast a vote either for a specific candidate (open list) or for a party (closed list).
The second main type of MMD-based system is known as the Single Transferable Vote, or STV, which is used in Ireland, in the Australian Senate and several Australian states, and for local elections in Scotland and a number of cities in New Zealand and the US. It was also used in many cities in western Canada in the early 20th century. STV operates similarly to open list systems, except that voters are given a ranked ballot so that they can specify not only their most preferred candidate, but also alternative choices to whom their vote could be transferred if their top choice is not elected. The BC Citizens' Assembly recommended in 2004 that BC adopt STV voting.
The other main way a voting system can represent most voters is by combining either single-member or multi-member districts with top-up seats - these are seats that are added on top of the SMDs or MMDs (typically at a regional level). Examples include New Zealand, which has 71 SMDs and 51 top-up seats elected at the national level from closed lists; Germany, which has 299 SMDs and 331 top-up seats allocated at the state level from closed lists; and Sweden, which elects 310 members from 29 MMDs (defined at the county level) using open lists, as well as 39 top-up seats allocated across the various counties. The system based on SMDs (used in New Zealand, Germany, and in the Scottish National Assembly (where there are 7 regions each comprised of approximately 9 SMDs and 7 top-up seats)) is commonly referred to as Mixed Member Proportional (MMP).