During last year’selection campaign, the soon-to-be Prime Minster Justin Trudeau indicated that he wanted it to be the last fought under First Past the Post. While he didn’t commit to implementing a specific replacement, he did indicate that his preferred replacement would be a preferential ballot system, commonly known as Instant Runoff Voting or Alternative Vote. This system is currently used for elections to the Australian House of Representatives, the Irish Presidency, and some state legislatures in India.
In this system, instead of marking an X beside a single candidate, voters will rank candidates by their preference. On this ballot paper, I have decided to rank three out of the five candidates, though it would not harm these three if I had decided to rank the other two. This vote would be considered valid in Ireland, however it would be considered spoiled in Australia as two candidates are unranked. Any committee looking into this system would have to decide whether this would be valid, but for my analysis, I am assuming that it is.
In each round of counting, each vote will count for the highest-ranked candidate on each ballot paper (in the first round, this will always be the one marked with a 1). In order to win a seat in the House of Commons, a candidate must surpass 50% of the vote in any round. If no candidate reaches this, then the last-place candidate is eliminated, their votes are redistributed to the next highest preference, and the count starts again. In the Kitchener — Conestoga example, we need to go down to the final two candidates before a candidate surpasses that 50% mark, and it turns out that it’s not the candidate who won the primary (first round) vote.
A common misconception about this method is that it allows people to get multiple votes. While a vote can be transferred between candidates, during each round of counting, each vote counts for only one candidate. There is also the belief that it will lead to otherwise-unwanted candidates getting elected, but it is very rare for an elected MP to not come from the top two in the primary vote.
Using preference information from Nanos Research just before the election, I calculated what would happen if it had been fought under IRV. Out of the 338 ridings across the country, 46 of them would change hands when compared to FPTP. Unsurprisingly, it’s the Conservatives who would lose the most seats by a switch to IRV; with the strong anti-Tory sentiment across the country, we see Liberal and NDP voters more likely to preference each other than anyone else. But we do see some non-Tory seats changing hands as well, with Conservative voters more likely to preference Liberals, and Bloc voters more likely to preference the NDP. But those seats roughly balance out in the end.
An IRV election last year would have given the Liberals nearly a two-thirds majority in the House of Commons, so you can be forgiven if you feel cynical as to Trudeau’s reasons for preferring this approach. While it does a good job of preventing the vote split that many blame for the Conservative majority government in 2011, it must be noted that this near-two-thirds majority is with less than 40% of the primary vote. One therefore has to ask if this really is any more democratic than what we have now.
