[URBAN NOTE] Preferential voting in Toronto by 2018?

[rfmcdonald]

The Toronto Star's Daniel Dale goes into much more detail than the CBC about the idea of instituting preferential voting for Toronto municipal elections.

At the request of Mayor Rob Ford’s executive committee and council’s government management committee, city elections officials are now studying a proposal to switch to a ranked ballot system. Councillor Paul Ainslie, the government management chair and a Ford ally, said he plans to bring the proposal to the council floor in November.

The group that has spearheaded the push for ranked ballots, the Ranked Ballot Initiative of Toronto (RaBIT), says 18 of the 45 members of council have endorsed the idea, including four members of Ford’s executive committee. While an endorsement-in-principle does not necessarily mean a committed vote, and while the Star could not independently confirm all of the endorsements, a 23-vote majority appears within reach.

[ . .]

The second: the provincial government would need to approve. According to the Ranked Ballot Initiative’s Dave Meslin, a prominent local activist, municipal affairs minister Kathleen Wynne has told him that she does not believe the province should stand in the city’s way if council votes in favour.

[. . .]

The ranked ballot system typically works as follows. Instead of choosing a single candidate, as they do now, voters are free to rank candidates in the order they prefer them. (A “1” for their favourite, a “2” for their second favourite, “3” for their third.) If a candidate gets a majority of first-place votes — more than 50 per cent — the election is over.

But if no candidate gets a majority of first-place votes — say, if the most popular candidate has 35 per cent — the least popular candidate is eliminated, and the second-place votes of that candidate’s supporters are added to the totals of the candidates who remain. This process of elimination and addition, known as an instant runoff, continues until someone has a majority.

At present, a widely disliked councillor can be re-elected with the support of even a quarter of the vote because several lesser-known challengers split the opposition vote. The ranked ballot, Meslin said, would ensure that the victor is truly the pick of the people while also weakening the powerful advantage enjoyed by municipal incumbents.