TORONTO

Toronto City Hall is about to dive into a debate over changing how we elect the mayor and councillors.

The Ranked Ballot Initiative of Toronto (RaBIT) has lined up enough votes to push ahead with trying to change Toronto’s municipal election voting system to a ranked ballot. If the change were to go ahead, Toronto would be the first city in Canada to switch to a run-off voting system rather than the first-past-the-post system.

Dave Meslin, RaBIT’s volunteer campaign director, told the Toronto Sun Friday he now has a majority of councillors — 23 in total — on board with pushing ahead with a ranked ballot system.

A motion that would spark the debate and could ultimately lead to the city asking the provincial minister of municipal affairs for permission to change the voting system is expected to be on the agenda of the May 16 government management committee meeting.

If all goes well, RaBIT hopes to have a ranked ballot in the 2018 mayor’s race and a ranked ballot for all council seats by the 2022 election.

“We’re trying to be very cautious, slow, make sure everyone is used to the new ballot,” Meslin said.

How would it work? The most common ranked ballot form used in U.S. cities asks voters to rank their top three choices — if you don’t want to choose three candidates, you could chose just one or two. Once the ballots are tallied, a candidate with a majority on election day would win. But if no one person has a majority, there would be an instant run-off: the candidate with the least number of votes would be eliminated and their ballots are transferred to whoever is marked as the second choice. That run-off would continue until any one candidate has a majority of votes.

Meslin argues the change would be for the better.

“Under our current system, a lot of voices are pushed out of races because of a fear of vote-splitting — this happens on the left and the right,” Meslin said. “You also have a lot of voters who feel pressured to vote strategically rather than who they want to support. You have a lot of negative campaigning with candidates attacking one another and (with) run-off voting, that strategy would backfire.”

But Meslin believes changing how Torontonians vote would also change the campaigns wage.

“It changes who runs and how they run,” he said. “In a run-off you want all your opponents supporters to like you enough to put you second so negative campaigns will hurt you.”