FPTP, STV, MMP, WTF? Like the time-change that the schools only caught up with last week, yet another sneak-attack on your sense of stability looms in your future with the impending call for Electoral Reform, and while the media blitz to hip you to the issues hasn't yet begun, that's only because it is far more fun to get everything you can't handle all at once. Only this is the Age of the Networked Citizen, and what that means is we have a friend online who's stepped up with some advance skinny on the whys and wherefores of this Best Kept Secret:

Little has been said in the MSM about this and we can but hope that a major 'education' process will take place once the recommendations is in place. Whilst we have yet to see which system will be recommended by the Citizens Assembly for Electoral Reform it is IMHO important that we understand the implications of what may be proposed. If one reads the submissions to the assembly ... you will see that basically there are 3 options:

1. First Past the Post (FPTP), our current system or some variation of it.
2. Single Transferable Vote (STV) of which there are many variations.
3. Mixed Member Proportional (MMP) which has a few variations.

[ Saugeen Community Blog: The Best Kept Secret ]

Follow along in your book as Rural takes you on a tour of all three, and don't forget the net-citizen commentary in the footnotes.

For my money, I think there are days when I side with all three of them, but there are also days when I think we may be better off letting Willie pick 'em. I also cannot help but recall an earlier discussion here on the SBP where I pondered a similar dilemma in the phrase of How can we use the old flawed method to select a newer better method when we know the old method was flawed? -- don't mind me, we pedantic pentametrists tend to worry about stuff like that.