Ranked Choice Voting: Toronto democracy fixed in three easy steps

The dirty little secret about democracy in Canada is that the way we decide most of our elections just isn’t very fair.

The first-past-the-post system, where the winner is simply the candidate who gets a plurality of votes in a crowded field, leads to endless guilt trips about strategic voting.

We push people to vote for the lesser-of-two-evils, under the guise that voting for a candidate with little shot of winning is nothing but a wasted vote.

The limitations of the system are most clear at the local level. In Toronto, candidates for  City Council in 2010 won elections with as little as 19 per cent of the vote.

And in 2014, Mayor Rob Ford is likely to hang his re-election chances on a vote split between two or more challengers — his team is practically  salivating at the notion of a race where NDP MP Olivia Chow and TTC chair Karen Stintz each carve off a chunk of the opposition vote.

If this kind of thing was just something inherent to democracy and elections, so be it. But there’s an alternative: A report coming to Toronto City Hall this week lays out the pros and cons of a system called Ranked Choice Voting.

I see a lot of pros, and not a lot of cons.

Ranked Choice Voting is simple: Instead of simply marking off a box beside one candidate on your ballot, you’d rank them. So your first-choice candidate would get a “1,” your second choice a “2” and so on.

When it comes time to tabulate, the first-choice votes would be counted. If a majority isn’t achieved, the last place candidate is eliminated from the count and their second-place votes distributed. The process continues until someone nets a majority win.

The net effect is that voters can use their first-choice to support candidates who best match their views, while giving their second- or third-choice support to the mainstream candidate that they only sort of dislike.

So environmentalists can vote for the Green party candidate without concern that their vote is helping out oil-loving Conservatives. And libertarians can support the privatize-everything candidate without fear that they’re offering tacit support to the NDP. No more guilt trips.

The report suggests we could implement this in Toronto as quickly as 2018 for the mayoral race, and 2022 for council.

The only real potential drawbacks identified are that a ranked-choice ballot might be hard to fit on a single sheet of paper, and that tabulating the votes on election night could take longer. To which I say: Hey, good news, computers have been invented. Sure, a new ballot system would require a fair amount of education and administrative change.

But that’s a small price to pay for fairness.