The Conservative government of Ontario is using the pandemic as reason to stop the move toward preferential voting and proportional representation.
One city has used Alternative Voting in one election, with Toronto and two others contemplating it seriously. But now the government announced that it will stop that pro-democracy shift by government regulation.
Alternative Voting exposes few more people to the COVID than the First past the post system. Any votes that are cast are counted in local polling places same as FPTP. Then under AV, the votes are collected for conducting any necessary vote transfersy at the central office. The only difference is extra counting at the central election offices.
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"Ontario moves to scrap ranked ballots in municipal elections"
Canadian Press, Oct. 20, 2020
A spokesman for Municipal Affairs Minister Steve Clark says municipalities should not “experiment” with changes to municipal votes during the pandemic.
The government says this measure will keep the electoral process consistent across municipal, provincial and federal elections. [This despite the fact that for 30 years voters in Edmonton used ranked ballots in provincial elections, Block Voting in city elections and FPTP in federal elections, without any large number of spoiled ballots. Calgary in that same period used STV in city elections and provincial elections, and FPTP in federal elections, again with no real difficulty. The number of spoiled ballots in each election in this period, 1924-1955, was in general less than a quarter of the number of wasted votes under FPTP.]
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Toronto had contemplated introducing a ranked ballot system.
Toronto Mayor John Tory says he supports the idea but city council recently decided not to pursue it for the 2022 election.
Clark’s spokesman, Adam Wilson, said the bill, which must still be passed by the Ford government, would only affect one of the province’s 444 municipalities. [The one is London, Ontario which used Alternative Voting in its lat civic election.]
“Our new proposed changes would bring predictability to municipal elections at a time when Ontarians are focused on their health and safety,” he said in a statement Tuesday.
NDP Leader Andrea Horwath slammed the government for once again interfering in a Toronto municipal election.
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Horwath noted how Doug Ford shortly after being elected cut the size of the Toronto city council, evoking a court case.
And in fact making London, Ontario scrap its Alternative Voting system may cause more confusion than allowing it to continue its elections under the system.
The government has so far only proposed the bill. It has not passed it yet, but with Doug Ford having a majority of the seats in the legislature it is not difficult to predict its passage.
Under Canadian law, each province administers the municipalities within it - and their elections.
This just shows how the unfairness caused by First Past The Post, an unfairness that generally aids the two largest parties, in particular the Conservatives, can only be addressed by political change - by pushing a party to advocate pro-rep/STV/AV/MPP or whatever, and then seeing it elected and it sticking to its promise.
Thanks for reading.
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