Month: September 2020

Members can cast their ballots to help choose the next Green Party leader from this excellent list of leadership candidates until October 3rd.

As with most elections in Canada, many voters are publicly endorsing their choice online. I’m not going to do that myself, both because I think it is important to preserve the secret ballot, but because I believe everyone should take the time to choose for themselves who would best represent them.

This is a contest which can yield only a single winner, so our party is using a Preferential Ballot that allows members to rank any or all the candidates in our order of preference.

We are much more familiar with winner-take-all First Past The Post elections in which voters can make but a single choice which very well might not count. In such an election, if 7 candidates were each to get 10% support, and one candidate gets 30% support, the latter would win, despite the fact they were not chosen by 70% of the voters. Because this is what we are used to, many (most?) Canadian voters have taken to voting “strategically” — instead of voting for what they actually want, they vote for who they think might win in hope of gaming the system to have a better chance of influencing the election.

I’ve gone from “we” to “they” because I disagree with strategic voting (though I understand why people do it), but that’s a post for another day.

The thing to remember here is this is a completely different kind of election. In FPTP elections, the ballots are counted once. We make a single 1st choice, and either win or lose. In an instant runoff election where voters can rank all the candidates. If no candidate wins 50% +1 of the voter’s first choices, the ballots are counted again to consider second choices. And recounted as many times as necessary to get a winner with some level of majority support.

Such a voting system is harder to game by strategically voting, especially when voters don’t understand the process. Even when we do, there are a variety of different ways of counting the votes so the method chosen can shade the outcome.

Some advocate voters should vote only for their top few choices, thinking this will disadvantage the candidates they like least, but it doesn’t really work that way. If you vote only for your top choice, if there are subsequent rounds of counting, your vote is then “exhausted,” and, just as it would be in a winner-take-all election, your vote would count for nothing. The best way to ensure your voice influences the election is to rank all the candidates in the order we prefer.