One thing you can say about Toronto’s recent mayoral election is the result provided a lot of certainty. John Tory won the ever-living heck out of this election. With 63.5 per cent of the vote in his favour, he’s Toronto’s guy. That’s a supermajority of almost two-thirds, which doesn’t make anything unanimous, but is more consensus than most elections provide. Tory has a strong mandate as the clear choice of most Torontonians for mayor.

You can’t say the same for all of the councillors who will be working with him. Frances Nunziata comes back to council with less than a third of the vote. Mark Grimes just nudged over 40 per cent. Gary Crawford, got 35.7 per cent of the vote and Brad Bradford got 38.6 and each of them beat their opponents by a margin that rounds to 1 per cent. In these cases — and a bunch more — the mandate from voters is blurrier. More people voted against them than for them, and opponents who split the vote can plausibly say they may well have won if the head-to-head choice had been clearer.

This kind of griping is a regular part of the first-past-the-post electoral system — it’s built right in to any election that features more than two options. But Toronto almost avoided it this time, having approved and planned to implement a ranked ballot system, until council chickened out and abandoned it for the status quo. In the days since the election, John Tory has talked about looking again at ranked ballots as a reform measure. I hope he does.

It’s a system in which, instead of simply picking one candidate to mark on their ballots, voters rank their top three choices. When it comes time to tally the votes, first place votes are counted up. If no one has a majority — more than 50 per cent of the votes — then no winner is declared right away. The bottom finisher is dropped off, and that candidates’ supporters second-place choices are counted and reallocated to the remaining candidates. If still no one has a majority, the next-last candidate is dropped off. The process continues until someone has more than 50 per cent of the vote.

It’s similar to the runoff system used by most political parties to select their leaders, and by some countries to select their presidents. It avoids a situation where most people’s least favourite choice wins because of vote splitting among more popular but closely related choices. It eliminates most of the need for strategic voting — allowing those who like a fringe candidate to happily support them on principle, knowing they won’t be helping elect someone they hate by voting for someone who’s likely to finish last.

We got to see this system in action here in Ontario in a municipal election for the first time this month. Though Toronto decided to stick with the old system, London conducted its election using the ranked ballot system. And we may see it more — Tory talked about bringing it back for study in Toronto, while voters in Kingston and Cambridge faced referendum questions about using it and voted yes.

The result in London wasn’t as dramatic as some electoral reform advocates might have expected. In every single council race, and in the mayoral race, the person who led on the first ballot wound up winning at the end of the process. It took some of them a lot of rounds to get to a majority: Ed Holder triumphed in the 14th round.

Which leads a lot of people to say, “why bother”? All that counting — it took more than 17 hours for the results to become final — and nothing changed.

But something did change. The ability of London residents to be confident in the legitimacy of the result. The ability of those elected — and their critics — to know that in every case a majority of voters marked their name on a ballot.

I think that legitimacy is worth something.

And just because, in this one case, no result differed from the initial first-past-the-post-style first-vote tally doesn’t mean it never will, or would. We can see from the real results of party leadership elections that it is often the case that the second- or third- or fourth-place candidate on the first ballot will emerge as the majority consensus after some losers are dropped off.

The topic of voting reform is a lively one, and everyone who cares about it has their own preferred system. I expect shortly to hear from hundreds of enthusiasts about why their preferred proportional-transferrable-ranked-mixed-member system is better than this one. But ranked balloting is the system in use in one municipality, and the one under consideration in others, including Toronto. It’s a better system than the one we have been using. One that ensures the will of the majority is respected.

I hope John Tory uses his own strong majority mandate to bring it to Toronto in time for our next vote.