Confusion over Elliott’s loss to Ford is … confusing

izarre.” “Confusing.” “Many Tories still don’t understand (it).”

These are some of the complaints that pundits and other interested parties have levelled against the process via which Doug Ford won the leadership of the Ontario Progressive Conservatives on March 11. As it happens, I have many similar complaints about the complaints.

There were clearly problems with the election: some percentage of party members wanted to vote and weren’t able to; some percentage of those who did vote were assigned to incorrect ridings, or to none. It is reasonable (if pointless) to wonder if the result would have been different had the system received the proper inputs.

But those were input problems, caused by some combination of haste, incompetence and skulduggery. The voting system itself was neither complex nor difficult to understand, and it’s somewhat disturbing that it’s being portrayed as such. If parties are going to canvass their membership to decide who should lead them in the legislature — and for now, they seem hell-bent on it — this might be the ideal way to do it.

The most common point of confusion seems to be this: How did Christine Elliott win the popular vote and the majority of ridings, and still lose? It’s a bad question, but it’s easy to answer.

Every Tory member (in theory) got a vote for leader. Each of the 124 ridings was weighted equally, no matter how many ballots were cast in it: each was worth 100 points, with the points allocated to each candidate according to the percentage of support he or she received. After the third ballot, a runoff between Elliott and Ford, each candidate’s points were tallied up from all 124 ridings.

Crucially, unlike in general elections, not every riding win was worth the same. Elliott’s 50.7-49.3 squeaker in Mississauga was worth much less to her than Ford’s 86.4-13.6 thumper in Etobicoke North was to him.

Let’s imagine just three ridings decided the election: Huron Bruce, Don Valley West and Etobicoke North. There were 300 points up for grabs; 150.001 points would win it.

On the third ballot, Elliott won Huron Bruce 294 ballots to 246, for 54.4 points (i.e., per cent), and Don Valley West 939 ballots to 332, for 73.9 points. Ford took 45.6 and 26.1 points from the two ridings, respectively. At this point Elliott is killing it: 1,233-578 on ballots, 128.371.7 on points.

But here comes Ford’s landslide in Etobicoke North: he won 407 ballots to 64, for 86.4 per cent to Elliott’s 13.6. That didn’t pull him ahead on popular vote, because relatively few ballots were cast in the riding. But it pulled him ahead on points because such a vast majority of the ballots were for him.

Explode that into a 124-riding universe, and you can easily see what happened: Ford won his ridings by a bigger percentage than Elliott won hers, so he got more points. The popular vote was irrelevant — which is why I say it’s a bad question. How did Christine Elliott win the popular vote and the majority of ridings and still lose? The party wasn’t using either of those criteria to decide its next leader!

Some of the consternation, I’m sure, is just frustration at the outcome. But there shouldn’t be any actual confusion about the system, which is fairly elegant and simple. And it certainly shouldn’t impugn the notion of online voting, which presented many fewer problems than some party organizers had feared.

It was human beings who screwed up or hadn’t sufficient time to get it right. By all accounts, the computers did exactly what they were supposed to do with the flawed inputs. By rights, the system should be considered a model for other elections, not a cautionary tale.

Canadians do seem to struggle with these basic concepts, though.

“The Liberals won 39 per cent of the vote and 54 per cent of the seats!” proportional representation fans will shriek, confident you will immediately adopt their outrage as your own. But the nationwide popular vote and seat count were never meant to be linked; it is not an accident when they do not correspond, but rather the product of 338 separate riding elections.

The system can be changed, of course. I for one am open to pitches — but not from people who insist the system is broken.

Meanwhile, political party members continue to enjoy the luxury of choosing their leaders as normal human beings choose between options every day: ranking their preferences from first to last.

The rest of us, meanwhile, traipse to the polls for provincial and federal general elections and mark a single dumb X, often rolling our eyes or swallowing bile as we do so. It does not have to be this way. But we will struggle to improve voting systems if we can’t even understand them.