PC leadership process eerily similar to U.S. electoral college
Think of it as Ontario’s version of the U.S. electoral college.
Progressive Conservative members elect their leaders using a system of riding points.
Anyone 14 and older who pays $10 to join the party is eligible to cast an online preferential ballot, indicating their first and second choices.
Each of the province’s 124 ridings is worth 100 points.
Here’s how it works: If a candidate receives 60 per cent of all Tory votes in a riding, they receive 60 points toward their tally.
It doesn’t matter if there are 100 PC members in a riding or 10,000 — each riding is as valuable as any other.
However, for ridings with fewer than 100 members, each votes counts as one point. A constituency with, say, 75 members would only award 75 points.
All that means is, like the U.S. presidential hopefuls, candidates can win the popular vote but still lose when it comes to electoral vote, thereby losing the election.
In the 2016 U.S. election, Democrat Hillary Clinton won the popular vote by more than three million votes, but Republican Donald Trump won the electoral college by 306 votes to 232 votes. He took 30 states while she won 20, including heavily populated California.
At issue on Saturday with the Conservative contest are hundreds of disputed ballots that could swing certain ridings a different way depending upon how they are allocated.