[3] In 2003, the Liberal government of Premier Gordon Campbell, with the agreement of the opposition New Democratic Party, established a Citizens' Assembly on Electoral Reform, mandating it to propose a new electoral system, which would subsequently be put to referendum.
The BC Electoral Reform Referendum 2009 Act Regulation Section.29.4 reads: Referendum advertising must not, directly or indirectly, (a) promote or oppose a registered political party or the election of a candidate, or (b) form part of election advertising.
Partially addressing concerns expressed during and after the first referendum campaign, voters were able to consult a map of proposed electoral boundaries under the BC-STV system, and advocacy groups were given some public funding to campaign for and against the new electoral system.
Unlike the fully single-member system in place since 1988, STV groups all legislative seats regionally into multiple-member electoral districts.
Political parties may nominate as many candidates in an electoral district as there are available seats, although experience with STV elsewhere (and all elections in general) suggests that not all will do so.
The candidates will be grouped by political party in separate columns on the ballot paper, as is the practice in the Australian state of Tasmania.
However, voters would be allowed to express the ranked preferences for candidates of different parties if they chose to do so.
If not all the seats are filled in the first count, a multiple-step vote-counting and transfer process is then used to determine the winners of the remaining seats in the district by taking into account secondary preferences on succeeding groups of votes cast.
Boundaries commissions, appointed after alternate elections, use census data to maintain a nominally uniform population level across districts (within court-mandated bounds) so that voters have approximately equal representation.
[citation needed][7][8] One of the criticisms of the use of single-member districts is that in many populous communities, in order to create districts with a population of approximately 50,000, it may be necessary to draw arbitrary boundaries that do not necessarily reflect a community of interest.
Proponents argue that this creates districts with a stronger sense of community and common interest, in which voters will have several MLAs and can get service or representation from any of them.
For example, the 11 new single-member constituencies within the municipality of Vancouver would be combined under STV to form two electoral districts, one West, one East.