Our messy Ottawa election should spawn a new way of voting
David Reevely, Ottawa Citizen
Published on: October 14, 2014, Last Updated: October 14, 2014 3:30 PM EDT
Ottawa’s got several city council races this fall in which our old way of voting will probably make a hash of the results and a new kind of ballot would help a lot.
Premier Kathleen Wynne wants cities to have the option of ranked-choice voting by the next election in 2018. The trick is convincing politicians chosen the old way to agree to the new way. In a month, we’ll probably have a bunch of object lessons in why they should.
In downtown Somerset, where longtime councillor Diane Holmes is retiring, voters are blessed with 11 candidates, of whom five are plainly capable of doing the job. The situation is similar in Innes, which veteran Rainer Bloess is vacating. The winners will probably be chosen with a third of the votes at most.
In other wards, incumbent who might be vulnerable could have their jobs saved by split opposition.
In Rideau-Rockcliffe, Peter Clark won with barely a quarter of the vote in 2010 and has three or four credible challengers. In Rideau-Vanier this year, one-term incumbent Mathieu Fleury is being challenged by the well-organized campaign of former Lowertown Community Association president Marc Aubin — but you can’t walk through the ward without being struck by how many signs are up for communications consultant Catherine Fortin-Lefaivre.
It’s similar in Kitchissippi, where incumbent Katherine Hobbs is up against the ex-president of the Hintonburg Community Association Jeff Leiper but neighbourhood activist Michelle Reimer is giving it her all, too.
Reimer has become enough of a force that she was targeted a couple of weeks ago by letters telling her supporters to ditch her and vote for Leiper because he’s the only candidate who can take Hobbs out. It was as direct as can be: “Voting for Michelle will split the vote and guarantee Hobbes [sic] wins.”
Leiper denounced the letters and we’ll probably never know who sent them or exactly why. But with ranked votes, such an argument would get nowhere. People who support Reimer could vote for her first without worrying that they were “really” voting for Hobbs by taking their votes away from Leiper, or vice-versa.
Making a choice that way is called strategic voting. Actually, it’s more blind-shot voting, based on guesses about what several thousand other people might do, including vote strategically themselves. It might be strategic if you have a PhD in game theory.
Sitting politicians are reluctant to fool with the system. (Jim Watson opposes changes, for instance.) It expressed the people’s wisdom in electing them, didn’t it? The last time somebody had the nerve to experiment with a change, when Dalton McGuinty launched a reform commission that suggested a move to proportional representation in 2007, voters rejected the idea.
What the commission proposed was a bit complicated, though: electing two kinds of MPPs, some through the first-past-the-post district elections we’re used to and some through party lists.
The ranked-vote idea is simple. If you can count up to about four, you can manage the ballot.
Well, it should be simple. In truth, even people whose business is to pay attention to such things can be confused.
At a debate last week, Hobbs said she’s skeptical of ranked-choice voting because — stay with me on this — in a three-way race with two fairly popular but deeply opposed candidates (let’s call them Katherine and Jeff), the third candidate (Michelle) could get elected if she’s the second choice of a lot of people who can’t stand one of the popular ones.
This is wrong. That less-popular candidate would come last and get knocked off. The winner would be whichever of Katherine or Jeff that Michelle’s supporters liked better. Or maybe, maybe, Michelle is actually the most popular candidate and would win, if only people didn’t vote for somebody else because they’ve “strategically” written her off.
What the ranked-vote system eliminates is the prospect that a surprisingly unpopular candidate gets elected, which is the result our current system barfs up quite often. If we see that on Oct. 28, our newly inaugurated councillors should make a priority of changing it for 2018.
For more on the election, go to ottawacitizen.com/tag/ottawa-votes.
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What is ranked-choice voting?
You get a ballot and mark your first, second, third choices (and beyond, if there are enough candidates and you want to) before dropping it in the box or the electronic reader.
At the counting stage, if no one candidates gets more than 50 per cent of the first-place votes, whoever comes last is dropped from the list and his or her supporters’ ballots are redistributed to their second-choice candidates. This repeats till somebody gets a majority, and that person wins. The city bought new balloting machines for this election that are supposed to be able to handle the counting automatically.
It’s like an instant version of the way political parties choose leaders, without the long waits and multiple ballots and deal-making in between. The idea is to choose a candidate who most people can at least live with, if not love.
It’s also called preferential voting or instant-run-off voting, and it’s a simple example of a group of voting methods called single transferable votes. Variations are used in Britain, Ireland, Australia, and in a few places in the United States.
http://ottawacitizen.com/opinion/columni...lection-should-spawn-a-new-way-of-voting
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