This month, British Columbians (in Canada) will be voting on whether to adopt proportional representation (PR) when electing their provincial representatives. If they do, they'll be the first province in Canada to do so.
Fair Vote Canada has been advocating for proportional representation in Canada's voting systems for more than 10 years, and I've been working with them for almost as long, using CiviCRM. They've grown into using more and more of CiviCRM's features along with their own growth in numbers, budget and sophistication.
When we started (May 2008), I imported 61 organizations and about 2,500 individuals from their Excel spreadsheets. As of this morning, they have 133,273 individuals and 1,817 organizations in CiviCRM, with 11,862,610 emails delivered and 38,065 donations received.
For the BC PR campaign, they're pulling out all the stops - raising more than twice as much money this year than last and taking out costly advertisements across the province to try and debunk the fear-mongering of the no campaign. It's a fascinating view of how established power tries to hold on, and an inspiring example of how a purely grass-roots, citizen-led initiative can confront it.
Do cross your fingers for them, and tune in on Nov 30 for the results.
Comments
Fantastic stuff Alan - We got proportional voting in NZ after a grassroots campaign & my personal belief is that it has been really positive for New Zealand having a system that forces compromise