No, we still haven’t found a miracle cure for low voter turnout

There’s still time for a post-election post mortem on our voting system.

The dismal, abysmal voter turnout of 43.5 per cent on June 2 was historically and embarrassingly low for a provincial election. But the cure is not quite so simple.

For all the dejection, this should be a time for careful reflection — not reflexive rhetoric about remedies that may ultimately lack democratic support.

In the aftermath of the June result, critics of the current system jumped in with questionable conclusions about the causes and cures for low turnouts in Ontario elections. They claimed the low turnout diminished the democratic legitimacy of Premier Doug Ford’s victory, because only a fraction of the eligible electorate supported him and so many were turned off — an argument that applies equally to the opposition parties, by the way.

For proponents of proportional representation, it also proved to be an irresistible opportunity to make unproven claims that their alternative voting method could spare us such despair. If only Ontarians upgraded to a superior form of democracy, the theory goes, they’d be more democratically engaged.

Embedded in this unexamined premise lies an unsupported panacea — that proportional representation is the people’s choice because it somehow reflects people’s preferences.

But what if it’s not necessarily true? What if the proposed democratic reform of proportional representation lacks democratic roots?

When last tested in the 2007 provincial referendum, it flopped: only 36.8 per cent of voters backed a hybrid version called “mixed member,” in which riding results are topped up with party lists of politicians to better reflect the provincial vote, with 63.2 per cent preferring to stick to the status quo.

All these years later, proportional representation is still lagging in popularity: Mainstreet Research found that it lost out to a “ranked ballot system,” which ranked higher as the preferred choice of Ontarians.

In fact, 35.6 per cent want the right to rank their choices on a ballot. Under this system, if your preferred candidate is eliminated, your vote doesn’t go to waste — your second (and third) choice on the ballot is automatically reallocated, in an instant electronic runoff, until the winner gets at least 50 per cent of the total cast.

Proportional representation landed in second place, backed by 34.3 per cent of those polled by Mainstreet. Yes, that’s a close second, well within the poll’s presumed margin of error (3.1 per cent 19 times out of 20, with a representative sample of 999 Ontarians surveyed).

But the current electoral system came a close third, with 30.1 per cent preferring the status quo known as “first past the post.” That’s almost a statistical three-way tie, suggesting the public is deeply split about any quick fix.

Interestingly — heretically for true believers in proportional representation — younger voters prefer the ranked ballot option by an even higher margin: 43.2 per cent of those aged 18 to 34 prefer the electronic runoff, versus 39 per cent favouring proportional representation.

Don’t tell that to the small band of Canadians who have found religion on proportional representation, and for whom electoral reform amounts to a reformation. To them, proportional representation is the answer to apathy, the purest form of enfranchisement, the most Solomonic system for allocating votes every which way.

While I’ve always been sympathetic, proportional representation remains a hard sell. Most people are unpersuaded of the alternatives, are too preoccupied by more pressing issues, or simply don’t follow politics closely enough to care.

That’s why the ranked ballot is an easier, fairer and more achievable tweak to our constituency system, short of rebuilding our entire democratic edifice. It lets people have their say in an instant electronic runoff, in the same way that political parties elect their leaders with second or third ballots until someone gets more than 50 per cent of the vote.

All that said, there is little evidence that the current electoral system is the disincentive that critics seem to think it is. Turns out it’s the politicians, and their parties, that turn people off.

Asked why they didn’t vote, 45.8 per cent told Mainstreet they didn’t think the candidates were “meaningfully different.” Another 15.6 per cent said the campaign lacked “any meaning.” And a further 20.4 per cent didn’t think their vote “mattered.”

That adds up to eight out of 10 eligible voters who were too turned off to bother turning out. Another 8.8 per cent “forgot to vote,” and a further 9.3 per cent “didn’t have time.”

Say what you will about the imperfections in our electoral system, those polling numbers speak volumes about the failures of our politics and politicians — from all parties — to motivate voters. But let’s not let the people of Ontario off the hook quite so fast.

When asked for their reaction to the record low voter turnout of 43.5 per cent, fully 72.6 per cent of those polled described it as “too low.” Which means many of those who didn’t vote weren’t happy that so many didn’t vote.

That’s democracy, in which the people are always right — even when they’re wrong not to vote.