In June New York City voters voted under a different voting system, a system that has only been used twice in Canada in the last 50 years.
The system is Alternative Voting, known also as Instant-Runoff Voting and Ranked-Choice Voting. Alternative Voting is the election of a single person, such as a mayor or a party's single mayoral candidate, by the use of ranked votes.
Ranked votes, also known as preferential votes, are also used in Single Transferable Voting, but in STV multiple representatives such as several city councillors are elected.
Ranked votes has been used twice for government elections in Canada on two occasions in the last 50 years. The first occasion was in 1971. This was the election of the Calgary city council. The 1971 election was the 46th election Calgary had held using Single Transferable Voting. It was the end of a long line of STV elections that had started in 1917.
The other occasion was in 2018 when London Ontario used AV in its city election.
The two events were separated by more than 45 years. But perhaps the election in London, Ontario was just the first of a new wave of elections where representatives will be elected by a more fair method than First Past the Post.
The recent election in New York City may be part of such a wave.
The goal of Alternative Voting is that the successful candidate will have the majority of the votes cast, or a majority of valid votes anyway. Sometimes however that does not happen, in which case the successful candidate is the one with the most votes when the field of candidates is thinned down to only two.
How is the vote done under Alternative Voting?
First, count the votes received by each candidate.
Calculate the majority - how many votes are half the votes, and add 1.
If a candidate has at least that number, he or she is declared the winner.
If not, the least-popular candidate is eliminated and the votes cast for that person are transferred to the next candidate marked there.
Eliminations continue until someone accumulates a pile of votes (a combination of both first-choice votes and votes originally cast for another candidate but now transferred to him or her due to marked back-up preference) that contains a majority of the votes. In some cases, the field of candidates will be thinned down to two without any candidate accumulating the majority figure. In those cases the most popular of the two candidates is declared elected.
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It might be that voters are not forced to rank all the candidates. In some AV elections they are and in other elections they are not required to do so. In cases where not all the candidates have to be ranked, very quickly there will be discovered votes cast for eliminated candidates that cannot be transferred because they do not bear a marked back-up preference that can be used to transfer the vote.
These votes are declared "exhausted" and put aside. The sidelining of votes in this way is one reason why in some cases no candidate takes a majority of the votes.
The other reason is just that many of the votes were spread among many candidates. Because AV allows votes to move from candidate, it allows more free voting than First Past The Post. Under FPTP, there are no transfers -- votes go only to the one preference marked there. Any votes cast for others than the winner elect no one. Voters must estimate whether their first choice has a good chance to win or if it is better to vote for a different candidate, one that is just a secondary preference but whom has a better chance to defeat the most disliked candidate.
In AV, such advance reckoning is not necessary.
If there are just two candidates, one or the other will win with majority support, wine or lose. At least a majority of voters will be happy with the result.
If there are more than two candidates then it is still possible for a candidate to win on the First count. If a candidate takes majority on the first count, then the process is over, win or lose. Perhaps the best liked candidate wins - or the most disliked - or another. That is life. And in this case too a majority of voters are happy with the result.
But if no candidate takes a majority of the votes on the first count, there is still hope - even if your vote was put on the the least-popular candidate who is now out of the running. Why? because your vote is not thrown in the trash but instead if you have marked a backup preference the vote is moved to that other candidate. You may not elect your first choice, but your vote may be used to help elect your second choice.
These transfers continue until one candidate accumulates a majority or until there are only two candidates. A candidate that you like may not be elected but it will be proven that a majority of voters helped elect the successful candidate, whether you are one of the majority or not.
Not everyone will agree on who should be in government but representation of the majority of voters is a significant achievement in a democracy. Less than 30 percent of the voters are sometimes pleased by the election result under First Past The Post. (Such was the case in Calgary-McCall in the 2015 Alberta election.)
Where the votes of a majority of voters did not elect the winner, it could be that a majority of the voters are unhappy with the result. We don't know under FPTP. Perhaps a majority of voters are relatively happy with the result or perhaps they are not.
But under AV, there is opportunity for the true public sentiment to be measured. And there is opportunity for the votes of a majority of the votes to be collected behind one candidate and used to declare the winner.
The fewer the number of exhausted the votes, the more likely one candidate will accumulate a majority. Putting a ceiling on the number of candidates that a voter can rank is dangerous for that reason. In the 2018 city election in London Ontario, voters could mark three candidates as their preferences. In the Democratic primary for the New York mayoral election, voters could mark five. With 13 candidates it is likely that many votes will be liable to be transferred more than four times and will have to be declared exhausted, with the voters that cast them not being able to elect anyone.
Only preliminary vote tallies have been produced so far, with thousands of mail-in ballots still being counted. Perhaps a candidate will take a majority on the first count or perhaps it will take 11 more counts to thin the field of candidates and establish a winner. Only time will tell.
Hopefully many voters will rank all five candidates that are allowed, and hopefully this will give election officials enough information to ensure that the eventual winner will have the proven support of most of the voters.
We will just have to see.
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