Ranked ballots were not ranked very highly in a new essay by a Windsor political science professor.

Written by University of Windsor associate professor Lydia Miljan, the essay — The Consequences of the Alternative Vote — came out Thursday in a book on electoral reform released by the Fraser Institute.

The Liberal Party vowed to make 2015 the last federal election held under the first-past-the-post system.

A committee on electoral reform is expected to report to the House of Commons by Dec. 1.

The Toronto Sun spoke with Miljan about her essay on Wednesday.

Q: What did you find in studying the ranked ballot system for past elections?

Miljan: “The most striking finding is that there is an inherent bias in the ranked system in Canada that favours the Liberal Party.

When we look at all the elections from 1997 to 2015, in every single case, the only party that increases the number of seats in the House of Commons would be the Liberals.”

Q: What motivated taking a closer look at this?

“It’s very difficult for them to put in some massive electoral change such as proportional representation or mixed member ridings, just because of the complexity.

So in order for the Liberals to fulfil their promise, (they could change) just the rules going from first-past-the-post to an alternative vote. Essentially you go from putting an X to a ballot to ranking your choices.

Even though (Prime Minister Justin Trudeau) says he is not going to impose his will on the committee, he has stated ... he personally has a preference towards alternative vote.

With those two things in mind, we thought this is probably the one most likely to be proposed, at least by the government. We’d seen other researchers who’d looked at the 2015 election campaign and did a similar analysis. We thought, well, is the case just 2015, because that analysis showed the Liberals would increase their majority — is it just an artifact that they had such an overwhelming majority to begin with, or is there something about this system that gives preference to one party over the other?”

Q: How has ranked ballot been used elsewhere?

“The only country that actually uses ranked ballots at a federal level is Australia, and what’s happened over time is that it’s really entrenched a particular coalition.

In Canada, actually we’ve experimented with ranked ballots in some of the western provinces.

What’s interesting — especially in the B.C. case — is the reason they went to ranked ballot is that there was a coalition between the Liberals and the Conservatives and they wanted to keep out the CCF. So they put in ranked ballots thinking that each would be the other person’s second choice, and ironically what happened in the very next election is that Social Credit, a party they didn’t even consider, ended up getting the ballot.

Even though parties might think they have a natural advantage going into something, situations can change and strategies can change. Things evolve over time. We acknowledge that every election is unique but just on face value, of all the parties, the Liberals would have the least work to do in terms of changing their strategy to be successful under a ranked ballot.”

This interview has been edited and condensed