Toronto council opens door to switching to ranked ballots for 2022 election

Thestar.com
Nov. 29, 2019
David Rider

Toronto city council has once again opened the door to fundamentally changing the way residents elect councillors.

Council voted 14-11 Wednesday to direct city staff to lay the groundwork for a potential change to ranked ballots for the 2022 civic election, including a report on implications of the change and holding “multiple open houses” as part of a “thorough” public consultation process.

Toronto voters currently choose one council candidate. The candidate with the most votes wins the seat. Critics say the “first past the post” system favours incumbents, encourages negative campaigning and has seen councillors elected in crowded races with as little as 17-per-cent support.

Under ranked ballots, a candidate with a majority of first-place votes --50 per cent plus one --wins, just as in the current system. If nobody meets that threshold, the candidate with the fewest first-place votes is knocked out. The second-place choices of that candidate’s supporters are added to the totals of the remaining hopefuls, and so on, until somebody has a majority.

In 2018, London, Ont. became the first Canadian city to use ranked ballots. Toronto council voted in 2013 to encourage the provincial government to allow municipal ranked-ballot elections. But then, after the provincial change was made, Toronto council in 2015 rejected electoral reform.

Coun. Shelley Carroll, who made this week’s successful motion, blamed the past flip-flop on a former councillor who lobbied councillors against ranked ballots and on the fact that city staff hadn’t fully investigated how ranked ballots would work for Toronto.

“(Wednesday’s) vote was just the first stage,” that doesn’t commit Toronto to making the switch, said Carroll (Ward 17 Don Valley North) who favours ranked ballots. “We’re properly opening the door with a sound legislative process, with a staff report and advice to council.”

Ranked ballots have injected diversity into the councils of some cities including Minneapolis. Toronto council remains much whiter and more male than the city the politicians represent.

London elected its first Black and openly gay councillors in 2018. But eight incumbents were re-elected and everyone who led on the first ballot ended up winning.

“I don’t think we can really say that ranked ballots changed very much here,” said Zack Taylor, director of Western University’s Centre for Urban Policy and Local Governance.

“It didn’t boost voter turnout and I don’t think it weakened the advantage of incumbency. It’s possible it did change the tone of the campaign. There is anecdotal evidence that candidates changed their campaigning approach to try to say, ‘Hey, you know, if you like that guy, you should think of me too,” in hopes of being second choice on the ballot.

“I think that it does have the potential to make every vote count in a way that our first-past-the-post system doesn’t. But I don’t think we can make definitive judgments after one city runs it one time.”

Advocacy group Ranked Ballot Initiative of Toronto welcomed city council’s vote. “We are confident that the information that staff will provide will demonstrate that this is a change we should have made long ago,” the group’s chairperson Michael Urban said.

Carroll said she was swayed to ranked ballots by a conversation with a San Francisco council candidate who told her they made candidates focus more on issues and less on personal attacks.

“More and more under social media, the tendency is just to tell as many lies about the incumbent and see which ones stick,” she said. Under ranked balloting there is less incentive for competing politicians to demonize one another and more incentive to debate issues civilly, Carroll added.

City staff are expected to report back on next steps by the summer of 2020.