The question before Londoners isn’t whether or not to vote, but how.

By the next year’s civic election, just 18 months away, London could become Canada’s only city to choose its local government with a so-called ranked-ballot system that would replace the first-past-the-post model, the traditional winner-take-all approach that can produce winners with a minority of the vote.

Instead, Londoners would rank their top choices on voting day — not just pick one candidate — in a system designed to produce winners with a majority of the votes cast.

It’s dramatically different than the system we’ve always used, one that would make London a trailblazer.

Then again, voters have shown before they have a limited appetite for such electoral reforms.

A final public input meeting is scheduled Saturday at city hall to let Londoners weigh in.

After that, a city council committee makes a recommendation to full council and, if the landmark change is to go ahead for October 2018, the politicians would have to approve it on a short time frame — by May 1, when a special council meeting is planned.

Mayor Matt Brown says his council needs to keep an open mind.

“I think it’s important for us to listen at these events . . . and get a sense of where our community wants to go in 2018,” he says.

No other municipality has taken ranked balloting as far as London has, with cities like Kingston rejecting it outright — even though Ontario opened the door to municipalities to adopt the new system with changes in legislation last year.

The track record for electoral reform in Canada doesn’t run far.

Ten years ago, in a provincial referendum, Ontario voters opted by a wide margin — 63.2 per cent — to stick with the first-past-the-post method of electing MPPs, rather than switch to a mixed-member proportional system.

More recently, Justin Trudeau‘s federal government junked its plans for sweeping electoral reform, a key plank in the platform that swept his Liberals to power in 2015.

While that’s not a measure of the benefits of any alternative voting system, some critics say it underlines that Trudeau believed he could flip-flop on the issue without paying a steep political price.

Now, the spotlight shift to London. As electoral reform advocate Dave Meslin puts it, London “has just become Ground Zero for democratic reform in Canada.”

“I’m definitely watching it very closely. It’s aligned with London’s reputation as a (consumer product) test market,” said Meslin, creative director for Unlock Democracy Canada,

Only this time, in London, it’s not McDonalds pizza that’s being tested, but a form of government handed down by the ancient Greeks to the rest of the world.

How would it work?

Voters would be supplied with a ballot that allows them to rank their choices for council member – their first, second and third choices. The threshold for a councillor to be elected is 50 per cent. In the first round, only first-choice votes are counted. The candidate who passes 50 per cent wins.

If there’s no winner, as the city’s website lays it out, then:

— The candidate with the fewest votes is eliminated and a new count begins.

— The ballots that ranked the eliminated candidate as the first choice are now counted again, but this time using the next candidate choice.

— The process is repeated until a winner can be declared with 50 per cent, plus one, of the vote.

As Meslin points out, this is the way all the major federal parties choose their leaders. It’s also the same method used on corporate boards and even by the Academy Awards to choose winning films and actors.

If voters don’t feel like ranking their choices, they can still choose just a first-place candidate.

“They just carry on as before,” said Andrew Sancton, a Western University professor emeritus of political science. “You don’t have to express a second or third choice.”

“No one’s forcing you to rank,” echoed Meslin.

“I think that this is a fundamental change to our voting system,” said Brown. “At this point, it’s my impression that the community is divided.”

If not for London’s controversial bus rapid transit (BRT) proposal, a $560-million concept that proponents argue would both speed transit and help steer future growth in London, some believe ranked-ballot voting would be the top issue in the city. Instead, the BRT file has consumed much of the political oxygen lately.

Brown says Saturday’s assembly will help provide focus to council.

“Anytime we hold a public participation meeting, I think it’s incumbent on any public official to keep an open mind, to listen,” he added. He said one of the biggest misconceptions about ranked ballots is that voters must rank all the candidates — not just their top three choices.

One thing different for London in this debate?

Unlike other bids for electoral reform in Ontario, there’s no organized yes and no campaigns — possibly making the final public input that much more important for the politicians.

“They’re not in the business of selling it, they’re in the business of deciding it,” Sancton said of council’s role in the possible switch to ranked ballots.

Ranked ballots by The London Free Press on Scribd

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THE ARGUMENTS FOR

Political scientist Andrew Sancton counts himself as a supporter of ranked ballots, saying, in a splintered electorate, it better reflects voters’ wishes – the entire point of a democratic government.

“It just gives voters more of an opportunity to express their preferences,” he said, which is especially important in a race where there’s no clear one or two people leading the pack.

Civic ward races sometimes have multiple candidates, not just two rivals, which means the winner can have as little as 20 per cent of the vote.

Dave Meslin of Unlock Democracy Canada, a group focused on democratic renewal and proportional government, said he’d like see London try the new system in 2018. “Just do it as a pilot program,” he suggested, followed by a “more deliberative referendum” when voters have experienced both ways of choosing winners.

“You can vote with your heart because there’s no such thing as a wasted vote,” he said. “It eliminates the need for strategic voting.”

He also says it will lead a “higher level of civility” because candidates will have an enticement to be nice to the supporters of others who are running. “If you spend the whole election attacking your opponents, it’s not going to do you any good,” he said.

Jeff Achen is the executive director of The Uptake, a non-profit news website in Minnesota, where a ranked-ballot election was held in 2015 in Minnneapolis, former home of funk superstar Prince and one of the few North American cities that uses a system similar to the one proposed for London. Achen’s website did several videos assessing whether the rosy scenarios held up by ranked-ballot proponents came true.

“One of the big things they said was it would lower the level of vitriol,” he said, which mostly held true. Candidates were “more restrained,” in Achen’s word.

“You can’t write anybody off,” Achen said, so candidates tried to avoid alienating other voting blocs.

That’s partly why Martin Horak, the director of the local government program at Western University, tends to favour ranked ballots: Everyone moves closer to the political centre. “So it should encourage candidates to put their positions more in the middle of the pack,” said Horak, who said he feels no urgency for London to have this system in place for next year’s election.

In Achen’s video series, his team also found that one of the main arguments against — ballots with slots for three choices are overwhelming to voters — didn’t hold water.

“We found that there was very little confusion about it,” Achen said.

Horak, also, feels there’s no urgent need to have this system in place for the next election.

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THE ARGUMENTS AGAINST

In the Minneapolis election, ranking proponents said doing so would increase participation, not turnout. In other words, there’d be more minority candidates and women. “We found no evidence that it increases turnout,” said Jeff Achen of The Uptake organization, a C-SPAN-style news site in the state.

Sandy Levin, a former London city councillor, says ranking is a solution in search of a problem — in other words, it may make voters feel good about voting, but it doesn’t change the results very much.

“For me, it’s what’s the problem that this going to solve?” he said.

Levin points out that, in a city where only three council races out of 14 did not have a winner on the first round, ranking candidates is close to a pointless exercise. “The people who won were the leaders on the first round, anyway,” he said.

Wilfred Day, an electoral expert with Fair Vote Canada, a national electoral reform campaign, said he doesn’t see much sense bringing in a system of ranking in a city like London, where there’s only one councillor per ward. For him, that’s the real issue that needs to be addressed.

“I just don’t think it’s going to make a difference,” he said. “I really don’t care. Either way, you have one person being king of the castle, or queen as the case may be.”

Day said he would rather see even more fundamental change: Have a city such as London composed of four wards, shaped like federal and provincial ridings, with four councillors each.

“The number of councillors per ward is what matters,” he said. “Even a two-member ward is better.”

London has 14 wards with one city councillor each, but used to have fewer wards with two councillors each.

“There aren’t a lot of cities that have done this. They’re all in the U.S.,” Levin said of ranked balloting. “There hasn’t been a lot of good research done on this,” and only very few case studies.

London would also have to trade up in terms of voting technology.

“By moving in this direction, we’d be introducing an increase in the cost of the 2018 election,” Brown noted.

Levin argues ranked balloting isn’t the panacea its supporters claim, because there’s no point changing systems if the end result is the same in most cases.

“It’s not what people are claiming it is,” he said.

Asked whether he’d prefer to face voters by running as the incumbent mayor in the current system or a ranked one, Brown pauses to choose his words.

“Ultimately, in any election, the voter is never wrong,” he said.

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SATURDAY’S MEETING

What:Public participation meeting on ranked-ballot voting for London

Where: City hall, 300 Dufferin Ave.

When: 11 a.m.

Who:City council’s corporate services committee will hear the feedback.

More information: Go to engage.london.ca

danbrown@postmedia.com