There is a group in Toronto promoting ranked balloting in municipal elections. They call themselves RaBIT. This means Ranked Ballot Initiative in Toronto. They seem to be also linked to the Fair Vote people—the ones who tell you your vote will not count unless your candidate wins. If it was not for the support of the Toronto Star and their friends at Forum Research, you could just ignore the foolishness.
In the last couple weeks, Forum Research made 950 (completed?) automated telephone calls in Toronto that indicated 65 per cent of whoever answered approved of ranked balloting. And so what? You would think that while they were at it, they would find 78 per cent like ice cream. The problem is that the Toronto Star then breathlessly reported that 65 per cent of Torontonians want ranked balloting.
The problem is that 65 per cent of Torontonians could not tell you how ranked ballots are counted. And that is the rub with ranked voting schemes. Stating your preference is the easy part and that appeals to voters. If they can understand it, they could be for it. And yet, they do not understand it entirely.
What is most objectionable about this method is that the losers choose. Instead of having a runoff vote, you have to make all your choices in advance. It is the second and sometimes third choices of the losers that are then counted to choose the winner.
Ranked ballots are also easily subjected to manipulation but we will leave that subject for private discussions. Putting information such as that on the Internet for anyone to use does nobody any good.
And what makes anyone think that the second or third choices of people who chose losers to begin with are any smarter than their original choice?
What this type of predetermined choices produces is mediocrity. The weight of the decision is shifted from the winners to the losers. It makes winners of people who have annoyed the losers the least.
And it does seem silly to even be discussing this at a time in history when we can do the entire voting job on the Internet. We can get almost immediate results and can easily and cheaply hold run-off elections to make sure of a majority choice. We can vote from home, at malls and libraries and with smart phones, we can vote from almost anywhere.
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Copyright 2014 © Peter Lowry
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