London city clerk wins praise for smooth shift to ranked ballots
Bureaucrat got on with the job despite advising councillors not to adopt method
Cathy Saunders has a kind of celebrity almost never seen in the world of municipal clerking. She’s the person behind London’s first-in-Canada switch to ranked-ballot voting, and the one who ran the show during Monday ’s civic election.
That historic move away from the traditional, first-past-the-post voting style is making London’s city clerk — a role more commonly associated with behind-the-scenes bureaucracy — a sort of, unlikely as it may seem, rock star-figure among her colleagues across the country.
“It was uncomfortable. We’re not here to take the glory. We’re here to implement the process and do our job,” Saunders said from her office Wednesday, civic election paperwork spread across the desk. The irony of the job? It was Saunders herself who recommended against the switch to ranked-ballot voting when the issue came to city council in May 2017, just a year before the 2018 election period opened, warning politicians there may not be enough time to prepare.
But council voted instead to jump headfirst into the new system, the only city that took advantage of Ontario making the move possible, and went down in the books as the first city in Canada to use a preferential voting system. “I’ve always been a person that takes on challenges,” Saunders reflected, pointing to a team of staff “holding her up” through the months-long process.
The last time Saunders had an evening or weekend to herself? Almost two months ago, before the 59-year-old began scurrying around London with a team of elections staff to to explain the new process in the community with mock elections and educate voters about how to use ranked ballots.
It was so busy for Saunders and her team, the only family time they could squeeze in recently was by taking family members along Sunday — the day before the election — to help them get ready for the big day.
In only her fifth election as a municipal clerk (she spent much of her career as a land-use planner), Saunders said she was pleased there were no election-night (or morning-after) gaffes as London blazed a trail for Canadian cities by going to the system where voters could rank up to three candidates for mayor and ward councillors. She admitted the switch has been the source of a few nightmares, especially since the monumental change threw London into a national spotlight, generating headlines and seeming to piqué interest in other cities that might follow London’s lead.
Two Ontario cities that closely watched, Cambridge and Kingston, voted in election-night referendums in favour of switching to preferential voting, but voter turnout in both cities was too low to make the move binding. City clerks from Toronto, Montreal and some western Canadian cities are also interested in hearing how the process played out, Saunders said.
Despite a long wait for full results — only first-round results were released on election night, between 11 p.m. and 1 a.m. — the shift otherwise went off without a hitch.
“It went smooth, so I was happy about that. It’s what I had hoped for,” Saunders said, admitting she didn’t sleep at all Sunday night. There’s been little time for rest since then, either, with work continuing into the early-morning hours Tuesday, and staff picking back up by 7 a.m. But Saunders is quick to credit her team, praising staff and calling the move to ranked ballots a “corporation effort.” “Despite the stress and extra hours, it was fun doing something different.”
The ballot-reading machines co-operated, as did the program designed to crunch numbers and reassign votes in a ranked-ballot system, eliminating the candidate with the fewest votes and redistributing their votes to the remaining competitors.
The only issue? Human error at some polling stations, where elections staff forgot to open the ballot box to allow ballots to slide in after they were read by the electronic tabulator.
Saunders apologized for the wait some voters faced. More polling stations were added this year, based on similar feedback in 2014, and city staff will review turnout and peak times to recommend changes before the next civic race. Ranked ballots were far from a popular shift. Many Londoners thought the change was needless — perhaps rushed — and others fretted about confusion at the ballot box. Ranked-ballot boosters contend it’s a more democratic system that reduces strategic voting and gives voters a voice, even when their top pick isn’t successful. Far more accustomed to angry emails than congratulations, Saunders said she wasn’t quite sure how to handle the thanks from Londoners who praised staff for delivering a problem-free, ranked-choice voting system.
While Saunders said she’s not going anywhere just yet, she plans to retire before the next election in 2022. She’d be happy to volunteer to lead a colleague through the process then, but said she doesn’t intend to go through the electionnight grind again.