Ranked voting is being referred to by many as the answer to Ontario’s electoral woes, but while Premier Kathleen Wynne has pledged to allow the system to be used in 2018, some sober second thought might be required before making the change.
The system seems simple. Each voter receives his or her ballot with a list of candidates. For Somerset Ward this time around that would mean a list of 11 choices.
The voter simply has to look over the list and indicate his or her first, second, third (and so on down the list of candidates) choices.
Ballots are then dropped into the electronic reader and counted. If no one candidate gets more than 50 per cent of the first-place votes, the last placed candidate is dropped and his or her supporter’s ballots are redistributed to their second-choice candidate.
This process continues until somebody gets a majority at which point they are identified as the winner.
Variations of ranked choice voting, which also goes by the names preferential voting or instant-run-off voting, are used in the U.K., Australia and some American cities.
It’s been heralded as a more representative voting system that encourages candidates to be less confrontational and more co-operative.
While the rhetoric sounds positive, the reality of ranked voting tells a different story.
Consider the case of San Francisco. The city has been using a ranked voting system, where electors pick their top three candidates, since 2004. The new system was touted as a solution to non-representative voting. Ten years later the opposite is true.
According to reports in the San Francisco Chronicle, in the 2010 race for supervisor in the city’s District 10 the winner received only 11.8 per cent of the first-place votes, beating out a candidate who actually had the most first-place votes overall.
Clearly, ranked voting can easily lead to a situation where the winner is the first choice of only a relatively small minority of voters.
This becomes even more of a problem when you look at statistics of how, after a decade of using the ranked voting system, the majority of San Francisco’s voters still don’t understand how it works.
A 2011 survey of 500 voters by the San Francisco Chamber of Commerce revealed that 70 per cent of voters didn’t understand how the system actually tallied their votes.
When that lack of education and understanding is combined with the problem of motivation the idea of ranked voting as the saviour of representative voting falls apart.
In the last election, only 44 per cent of Ottawa’s voters took the time to vote, while 43 per cent turned out in Somerset Ward.
If voters can’t be motivated to have their say when it comes to picking one candidate how much worse will it be when they have to choose 11?
Ranked voting is an interesting experiment, but if representative voting is what the province needs it’s not the solution.