This is very, very old news. The oldest, in fact.

On the positive side, perhaps this report is a sign that change is coming. Very hard to imagine, however...

Put ranked balloting to a referendum
(Hamilton Spectator, Andrew Dreschel, Apr 5 2016)

Well, that didn't take very long.

Scant hours after Municipal Affairs Minister Ted McMeekin gave municipalities the option to switch to ranked ballots for electing their councils in the 2018 election, Coun. Sam Merulla's foot was already hitting the gas.

Following Monday's announcement, Merulla drafted a motion which aims to direct city staff to outline the options that council needs to consider based on McMeekin's proposed changes to the Municipal Elections Act.

He intends to bring it forward at next Wednesday's council meeting. Good for Merulla. Apparently there's no time to waste.

Last year Hamilton's election manager Tony Fallis figured council will need to make a decision no later than December of this year if ranked balloting instead of the current plurality voting system is going to be used for the 2018 municipal election.

The long lead time is not only needed to properly prepare new voting tabulators and educate voters, but there also has to be a lot of public consultation.

Hopefully the options that staff present to council will include holding a referendum on the issue…

To my mind, it's the only fair way to deal with possibly changing our familiar and easy to understand first-past-the-post system. It may have its flaws, but such a time-honoured and accepted method shouldn't be replaced without the explicit approval of the voting public.

I feel exactly the same way about Prime Minister Justin Trudeau's promise to move to an alternative voting system at the federal level. If you want to fundamentally change how people elect their representatives, then surely you need the consent of the people who do the electing.

If any government, legislature, or reform advocate believes the public truly wants to overhaul the voting system, then they should be willing to put it to a democratic vote. Anything other than that is both paternalistic and elitist.

Speaking of which, it's more than bit incongruous to hear McMeekin promoting ranked balloting as an option for municipalities while the province happily adheres to first past the post for its own election system.

As Merulla notes, it's both "hilarious" and "cowardly" that the Wynne government is willing to advance progressive legislation and throw the door open for debate for others but not itself.


Read it in full here.

So what's ranked voting supposed to solve for Hamilton? I don't see much change with regards to the results for incumbents, although now I guess if there's an incumbent I don't like I could rank them dead last. Plus in the recent election in ward 7, ranking that many candidates is somewhat ridiculous.

I don't think it will change much where there's incumbents, but it's the results like Ward 7's (and Ward 2's circa 2010) that it aims to fix. Getting a seat with essentially 20% of the vote is ridiculous.

In Ward 2, I had to choose one person, but there were three that I would've been perfectly happy with. It would've been nice to been able to indicate that.

But it's the incumbents (i.e. sitting councillors) who have been tasked with implementing this change, and two years in, even the newbies resemble barnacles. Consider the not-unrelated "consultation" around ward boundaries.

See

"[Ward 13 Councillor Arlene VanderBeek] suggested it’s pure speculation to guess what the committee’s recommendations might be, but said her fellow council members are only committed to conducting the review and not to making any changes."

and

At the end of the day, says [Ward 9 Councillor Doug] Conley, it will be council that decides whether or not to change the ward boundaries. “Nobody likes change, especially big change,” he said.


Even worse: 5% of eligible voters.

Brad Clark has posted on facebook that Mahesh Butani has died.