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Ed Holder gets job after 14 rounds of counting in new election system In the end, Ed Holder got 57,000 votes to become mayor.
London mayor elected after 14 rounds in country’s first municipal vote under ranked-ballot system,
The country’s first municipal vote to be held under a rankedballot system was finally decided Tuesday, with a mayor declared after 14 rounds of counting.
Under the system, in which voters picked their top three candidates in order of preference, Ed Holder was declared the winner over his closest challenger about18 hours after polls closed Monday evening.
This was the first province- wide election in Ontario in which municipalities were allowed to use ranked ballots rather than the traditional first- past-the-post system that rewards a person with the most votes, regardless of whether that translates into a majority.
Only London opted to go that ranked-ballot route after public consultation and passage of a bylaw. Two other communities — Cambridge and Kingston — asked voters during Monday’s election whether they should move to ranked ballots in 2022. Voters in both centres said yes, but Cambridge didn’t have a large enough turnout to make the result stick.
Under the ranked system, votes are counted and the lastplace person is dropped from the ballot. However, their votes are distributed according to the second and third-place choices voters indicated, provided those candidates have not been eliminated.
To win, Holder had to win a simple majority.
He started off strong, taking about 33,000 votes to lead the balloting on the first round. However, despite coming out as the front-runner through subsequent rounds, he was unable to make much headway through round 11, where he still led against three other challengers.
It was only in the following few rounds that he finally powered his way to more than 57,000 votes and a solid victory over his second-place rival, Paul Paolatto.
Holder, 64, a former Conservative MP, takes over from Matt Brown.