Toronto has a plan to fix democracy
Proposal for ranked city ballots a big improvement on status quo
Sometime later this spring a small bomb is set to go off in Toronto. Don’t be alarmed: I mean only a vote of the city council. But it is a vote with potentially ground-shaking implications.
The proposal to come before Toronto’s councillors, probably in May, would change the method by which they are elected, from the first-pastthe-post system in use at all levels of government in Canada to a ranked or preferential ballot. On the surface this would change little. Instead of marking an “x” on their ballots voters would rank candidates in order of preference: 1,2,3 … But its adoption by Canada’s largest city could change a great deal — not only in Toronto but across the country.
If it sounds familiar it should: It is a variant of the system our political parties have long used to elect their leaders. After each ballot, the last-place candidate is knocked off; his votes are then redistributed among the remaining candidates, and so on until one candidate has a majority. Only instead of grinding through several ballots, as at traditional conventions, the process is compressed into one, via the voters’ second and third (and fourth, and …) choices. Hence its other name, “instant runoff” voting.
The advantages of such a system are clear. At present, a candidate can win with 20 per cent of the vote or less, depending on how many names are on the ballot and how the vote splits. A party can win a “majority” with a similarly meagre share of the vote. Not only does this raise issues of democratic legitimacy, but it leaves many if not most voters effectively unrepresented. They had no hand in electing the winner, whose views may be entirely hostile to their own.
Worse, it puts them in the invidious position of having to vote, not for the candidate they actually prefer, but for some other candidate, in order to prevent yet a third candidate from winning. Not that this usually works. When a candidate needs only a small slice of the electorate to win, he has little incentive to make himself less obnoxious to the rest; indeed, he has every incentive to amp up the us-and-them rhetoric, the better to lock down his support.
With a ranked ballot, on the other hand, it’s not enough merely to have the most votes. You have to get a majority. Vote-splitting thus ceases to be an issue: Voters can mark a 1 beside their preferred candidate in good conscience, knowing that their second and third choices will also be counted. And because a candidate will typically need those second and third choices to win, he now has an incentive, not to attack and divide, but to reach out to supporters of other parties.
The one thing such a system would not achieve is proportionality, the desideratum of most electoral reformers. Even 50 per cent of the vote would still entitle the winner to 100 per cent of the power. The distribution of seats would still bear little relationship with the share of the vote going to each party. That’s obviously less of a concern in municipal politics, where parties are rare. But it does raise the question: Is half a loaf better than none? Would Toronto’s adoption of the ranked ballot help or hurt the broader cause of electoral reform?
Almost certainly it would help. Past proposals have all suffered for being, or being made to seem, an abstraction: While most other countries use a form of proportional representation, there were no examples you could point to in this country. However unhappy they were with the present system, people could be made to fear change meant something worse. Referendums on reform were transformed, in effect, into referendums on “do you want to live in Canada?”
So while a ranked ballot is not proportional representation, it would, crucially, mark the first breach in first-past-the-post’s monopoly in this country. The seal having been broken, the status quo might no longer exert quite the same grip on the public imagination: Toronto would serve as a constant, concrete reminder that other possibilities existed, lending credibility to reform efforts of all kinds. And if that’s as far as it went? The ranked ballot would still be a vast improvement on the status quo.
And yet the idea has proved divisive within the electoral reform movement. Britain’s 2011 referendum on the “alternative vote,” as it is called there, failed, in large part over a split among reform proponents: some arguing the case made here, others fearing that any change short of full proportional representation would be worse than none at all. You only get one shot at reform, the latter group reasoned. No sense wasting your only bullet.
In Canada, absurdly, this dispute has led to some supporters of the Toronto initiative being expelled from the country’s leading electoral reform group, Fair Vote Canada. This is madness. Even if Toronto opted to go no further than the ranked ballot, that’s no reason to think the rest of the country would do the same. Whereas if reform is stopped there, it really might be its last shot.