Council should embrace ranked ballots and let our real first choices prevail
Voters too afraid to express their real preference and candidates with no real mandate are far too common under the status quo, writes Royson James.

thestar.com
April 5, 2016
By Royson James

In Toronto’s last vote for mayor, top candidate Olivia Chow rightly sensed that a significant percentage of her supporters felt compelled to vote for someone else - not because they opposed Chow’s candidacy, but because they feared what one of her opponents stood for.

Choose hope, not fear, Chow reasoned with them. In vain.

As it turned out, those Chow supporters who migrated to John Tory in order to block Doug Ford were proven right. Tory needed all of their votes to defeat Ford.

But how many wished they could have voted with their heart, wished they could have left the ballot box as happy citizens, not compromised and fearful ones.

That’s one of the outcomes under voting reforms announced by the provincial government Monday. It’s an excellent move that promises to increase voter engagement, reduce negative campaigning, give voters a greater say and allow candidates polling behind the front-runners to stay in the race until election day without fear of “splitting the vote.”

Above all, it takes away the current cynicism that allows a candidate to appeal to narrow interests in hopes of winning the race with hard-core support while the rest of the field split the mainstream vote.

Starting with the 2018 election, a city can opt to allow citizens to vote their first, second and third choice on the municipal ballot. It’s a choice that advocates across the province have rallied to seize - one that Toronto council tried to subvert in a cowardly and controversial move last year.

With the changes - a first for Ontario - a voter can vote the candidate of choice, knowing that if the preferred candidate does not win, the vote is not lost but can be transferred to a second choice, then a third. Around here it’s being called Ranked Ballots.

In the example above, the citizen could vote for Chow as first choice, Tory as second and D!ONNE Renee third. The ballots would be automatically tabulated and retabulated until it lands on the candidate that appears on the majority of ballots - 50 per cent plus one. When your first-choice candidate is eliminated, your vote foes to your second choice and so on.

This is not as simple and recognizable as the system we’ve grown up on. The current system is called First Past the Post. When the voting is done, anyone with the most votes wins - a system that can be simply exposed as ridiculous in its head-scratching outcome.

In the 2014 election, for example, the winning councillor in Eglinton-Lawrence garnered only 17 per cent of the vote. In my Ward 10, James Pasternak won in 2010 with 19 per cent of the vote, beating out 11 candidates. In both those cases, there was no incumbent and the contest attracted numerous candidates.

If that is unacceptable - a representative with less than 20 per cent support - consider a ward where there is an incumbent and he or she wins with a quarter of the votes cast because the opposition is fractured among several candidates. This happens too frequently. In fact, few winners get the majority of the votes cast.

Rookie Councillor Justin Di Ciano successfully introduced a council motion last year that signalled city council may not be in favour of this reform - even though Toronto advocates have carefully nurtured the idea and obtained support from former councils. Di Ciano said Ranked Ballots is too confusing. His motion, surprisingly backed by a majority of council, advised Queen’s Park not to introduce the reform.

The province ignored this latest request and heeded earlier ones from Toronto councils and recommendations from across the province.

To suggest ranked ballots is too confusing is an “insult to Toronto voters,” says Dave Meslin, who has spearheaded the reform for about a decade.

“It’s a patronizing view that voters can’t count to three. What is confusing is how two incumbent councillors were re-elected even though more than 70 per cent voted against them. Councillor Ron Moeser received 25 per cent of the vote; Frank DiGiorgio had 28 per cent. That’s confusing. People don’t understand that. Why do we still have the old guy” when 70 per cent voted for someone else?

To get this in place for the 2018 election, Toronto council would have to ignite the initiative soon. There would be public consultations, much education, design of the system and changes to the voting machines (luckily the city clerk had informed council that the machines would be updated following the 2014 election).

City council should seize this opportunity.

Try this new approach. If it doesn’t work, we know the devil of a system we can return to.