Ranked Ballots for Canada

Parties elect their leaders with 1,2,3 ranked ballots. Let's elect MPs that way!

The Criteria for a New Electoral System

The Special Committee on Electoral Reform has been defined and we couldn’t be happier. All the criteria point clearly to a Ranked or Preferential Voting system and practically rule out a number of others. Here are the official criteria: (a) Effectiveness and legitimacy: that the proposed measure would increase public confidence among Canadians that their democratic will, as expressed by…

Less of What You Don’t Like

Sometimes a vote for an MP is motivated mostly by the party that the candidate belongs to, sometimes it is mostly the individual, or a combination, but often a major motivation is ensuring that one particular candidate does not win. Each motivation for voting is legitimate, don’t let anyone tell you that you are voting incorrectly. So how easy is…

What is a majority?

Under the current voting system, do you need a majority of votes to be elected MP? That’s the wrong question to ask.  Why?  Because it’s ambiguous.  The word majority has two different senses.  If you look in an American dictionary, it will tell you a majority of votes is a number or percentage equaling more than half of a total.  But…

Ranked Ballots Avoid the Vote Splitting Strategy

One of the ways in which plurality voting (sometimes called first-past-the-post) can fail to capture the preferences of voters is through “vote splitting.” Vote splitting means that two candidates who are liked equally by a majority of voters, or where voters like both better than the other candidates are less likely to be elected than a candidate who is disliked…