<p>The Canadian citizen assemblies on electoral reform have drawn enthusiastic attention from proponents of deliberative democracy. However, none has resulted in changing the electoral law. This paper examines why these electoral reform movements failed across Canada despite the endorsements for change from deliberative citizen assemblies. Most scholarship has focused on the lack of information among the voters in referendums held to endorse the proposals. Using surveys and official vote returns, however, we show that partisanship played the decisive role. Party partisans who would have benefited from electoral reform generally supported it, while party partisans who would have been harmed largely opposed it and drove it to defeat. Thus, the electorate behaved in ways very familiar from empirical studies of voting but quite different from their assigned role in deliberative theory. These cases exemplify the difficulty of changing the status quo through the mechanisms envisaged in deliberative theory.</p>