COURTENAY, B.C- Residents of the Comox Valley didn’t want to change our voting system.
That’s according to the results of the province’s mail-in referendum on proportional representation, which were announced this afternoon.
The first question on the referendum was whether voters would like to change from our current first past the post system, and the second was a ranking of what system voters would like to change to.
In Courtenay-Comox, 12,607 people voted in favour of first past the post. 10,249 were in favour of a change. A total of 22,856 people voted, with 156 invalid votes.
Voters were also asked to rank Dual Member Proportional (DMP), Mixed Member Proportional (MMP), and Rural-Urban Proportional (RUP), which required two counts.
In Courtenay-Comox, DMP had 3900 votes, MMP had 5440 and RUP had 5064. 8608 votes were invalid.
In the second count the votes from RUP, the least favourite, were transferred to voters second choice.
In that, the results were MMP with 8542 and DMP with 4707. 1155 ballots were exhausted.
Provincially, 61.3% of participants voted to keep the current first past the post system and 38.7% were looking for a change.
1,402,358 packages, representing 42.6% of registered voters in the province, were returned. Of those, 1,391,423 ballots were valid.
