The idea of voting with ranked or preferential ballots is an idea that should never be implemented. If there are only three or four candidates on the ballot, it really doesn’t matter. It is when there are five or more candidates, the system can start to work against the voters.
And yet people still keep promoting the foolishness. There are municipalities using the system of voting to choose their councillors. The un-elected liberal leader in Ontario promises voters that he would implement a change to ranked voting if he became premier. It is mind-boggling what ignorance could cause.
Even the federal conservatives (who were supposed to have announced the rules by today and have not mentioned voting) are likely to use ranked voting to control the voting for their third new leader in three elections. Using ranked voting, the conservatives keep picking losers.
The problem is not the knowledgeable voter. The knowledgeable voter never votes for someone he or she does not know. If the candidate is unknown to the knowledgeable voter, that space is left blank. It is the unknowing who votes for people they do not know. They think they have to fill out all the options.
And that is why, in a close race, with a large number of candidates, you are drawing from the bottom of the pile, with what can be a minority of the voters.
And the more you think about it, the sillier it sounds. You wanted to improve our democracy through electoral reform. That is commendable. The only problem is the reform should be based on knowledge.
It reminds of back in the days when the City of Toronto had two councillors (then called aldermen) per city ward. The alderman who got the most votes in his or her ward, sat on both city and metro councils and got more money. There were more than a few ways of convincing people to only mark one “X” on their ward ballot. While we were often accused of it, we never did anything improper. It was the former metro councillors who got bounced out of the top spot who expressed the sour grapes.
When the Trudeau government studied voting reform during its first four-year term, it should have listened less to political scientists and more to politicos who understand how people vote.
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Copyright 2022 © Peter Lowry
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