In a Canadian first, London to use ranked ballots

Toronto, cities across country, watching closely to see if new voting system will be successful

First you choose your favourite. And then you pick another. And finally, if there’s a third candidate you wouldn’t mind holding the keys to your city, go right ahead and select them as well.

You have up to three choices — first, second and third, in order of preference — all for the job of mayor. And three more for local councillor.

Those are the unprecedented options awaiting voters in London, Ont., Monday as they enter the polling booths for the first-ever Canadian experiment in ranked balloting.

And this new way of doing democracy is drawing interest across the country.

Grassroots proponents argue the ranked-ballot approach encourages civility in politics, eliminates vote splitting, creates an opening for a more diverse slate of candidates and delivers results that capture voter preference in a deeper, more meaningful way.

Skeptics argue the system is confusing and that it expects too much of the average voter, who may only barely be able to name one candidate for council in their local ward, let alone three.

After years of back-and-forth theoretical debate, London now will give us a real-world example, thanks to Ontario legislation that in 2016 gave Ontario’s 444 municipalities permission to try it.

While London is the first to take the leap, ballots in the cities of Kingston and Cambridge will include a referendum on introducing the system in the next round of municipal elections in 2022.

Nobody is watching the London experiment more closely than activists in Toronto, where the all-volunteer Ranked Ballot Initiative of Toronto (RaBIT) has been working feverishly to win hard commitments to bring the format here in the next election.

As of Sunday afternoon, 97 Toronto candidates had taken the pledge, at least one from each of Toronto’s 25 wards. That field of supporters includes both Mayor John Tory and his primary rival, Jennifer Keesmaat.

“What London is doing is giving people the lived experience,” said Miriam Anderson, a spokesperson for RaBIT. “That’s so crucial for those of who support ranked ballots because opponents say the sky will fall and now we’re finally going to see what it looks like. And I predict the sky will not fall.

“It’s real, it’s tangible. London is a fairsized city, grappling with many of the same issues as Toronto. We’re going to see London voters get more power and deliver a more meaningful vote. And we are doing all we can to bring that mo- mentum here.”

London’s experiment is not happening in a vacuum. The technique of rankedballot elections is gaining momentum elsewhere, including the U.S., where the entire state of Maine and a wide range of other American cities now employ it. Electoral officials in Minneapolis have been helping guide their London counterparts on how best to explain the mechanism to voters.

The way it works is this: When polls close at 8 p.m. Monday night, electronic machines will perform the count in London, beginning with all of the first choices in the races for mayor and the city’s 14 wards.

If no candidate receives 50 per cent plus one of the votes, the bottom-finish is eliminated and his or her ballots are redistributed to the remaining candidates, this time using the second choice on those ballots. If no candidate reaches 50 per cent plus one, the process of eliminating the last-place finisher is repeated, again and again, until a winner is declared.

Given the closeness of the London race, where polling suggests a three-way dead-heat for mayor, the new approach may well be a game-changer, according to Martin Horak, associate director of the Centre for Urban Policy and Local Governance at University of Western Ontario.

“If this were a traditional mayoral race using first-past-the-post, I would say it is anybody’s race,” Horak told the Star.

“But the fact is that three of the top four candidates have overlapping positions that tend to be clustered to the right of one of the front-runners, Tanya Parks, who is much more clearly on the progressive left. So she’s going to have a really hard time getting elected with ranked balloting.

“But that just goes to show you that the vote is ideologically neutral. This new system doesn’t favour one side or the other. If it works as it is supposed to, it is going to produce results that better reflect where majority opinion lies. And if majority opinion lies on the right of the spectrum, it is more likely to produce right-wing politicians.”

Yet supporters of ranked ballots are watching London not just for who wins, but also for the tone of the race itself. Some note that London’s mayoral race already has played out with far greater civility than that of Hamilton. Both cities are grappling with big-ticket transit schemes as their key issue — an LRT rail plan for Hamilton versus a BRT bus plan for London — but it is the Hamilton race that has turned notably divisive in recent weeks, with an anti-LRT candidate gunning for steel town’s incumbent mayor.

“The tone in Hamilton has turned harsh and antagonistic and that’s why we’re here on the ground trying to awaken people to a better way,” said Nick Tsergas, who is leading a team of “young political nerds” raising awareness for ranked balloting in Hamilton under the name of Make Your Vote Count.

“Our argument is it doesn’t need to be like this. We can shift to a more sophisticated system that requires candidates not to alienate people. We want the momentum in London to spread because ranked ballots discourages these kinds of divisions.”

Dave Meslin, Creative Director of Unlock Democracy Canada, has been at the forefront of the Ontario campaign for ranked voting and his recent itinerary demonstrates the grassroots nature of the effort.

When the Star caught up to him this weekend, he was staying on a friend’s couch in Kingston after a day of leading a group of volunteers on an awareness drive for Monday’s ranked-ballot referendum.

Last week he was in London, couchsurfing with another friend, as he interviewed advance-poll voters on their first impressions with the new format. The week before that he was in Cambridge, where he enjoyed the luxury of a spare bedroom, courtesy of a volunteer campaigner there.

“We don’t have much of a budget and what we do have, we try to put into lawn signs and leaflets and T-shirts. This is all through individual donations, so finding a place to stay that doesn’t involve the cost of hotels is what we try to do,” said Meslin.

“I hope what that shows is not only our level of commitment, but also that all these changes come from the bottom up. There’s a built-in incentive for politicians to not want to change the system that got them elected. So it’s really important and really inspiring that we have volunteers right across Ontario, working for positive change from such a grassroots level.”

For Meslin, the argument for ranked ballots begins with civility.

“Negative politics — the kind of toxicity that often exists in our legislatures and in our elections — really turns off a lot of people. And the people who remain engaged and interested tend to be groups of insiders.

“So the more civil we can make it, the better. And ranked ballots create an incentive to be civil and respectful of different opinions because all the candidates are looking to become people’s second choices, not just their first.”

Multiple selections are an option, not a requirement.

“The thing to remember is that interest in local elections — including voter turnout — is always quite low. I don’t think there was ever a golden age in local politics, it’s always chronically been moderate to low,” said Horak.

“Ranked ballots create an incentive to be civil and respectful of different opinions.”