Does the ward seven by-election outcome demonstrate a need to change the city’s voting system now that there is an opportunity to do so? A seasoned political commentator suggests the current ‘first-past-the-post’ election system is less like a horse race and more like a hot dog eating contest where the winner only needs to eat one more frank than any competitor.
“It’s really hard to see much legitimacy in someone getting elected with 19% of the vote versus 18% for the second place finisher,” McMaster political science professor Peter Graefe told a public meeting last week. “Maybe ranked balloting is a way of overcoming a situation where you have a 22-way split.”
With less than a quarter of eligible voters turning up at the polls, it means winner Donna Skelly garnered less than 5 percent of possible ballots. That’s the lowest in recent memory, but far from the first time that city councillors have been elected with support from a small percentage of constituents.
In the 2014 election, Doug Conley got his seat with just 1750 votes – fewer than Skelly’s 1967 – although his 26% share added up to nearly 9 percent of eligible voters in his ward. The winners in three other seats where there was no incumbent also got less than half the ballots cast but all won by a bigger margin than Conley with Matt Green and Arlene Vanderbeek both pulling in over 40 percent.
However history suggests that even the smallest margin of victory will almost certainly result in easy re-election if these councillors run again as incumbents. In the 2010 election, for example, Jason Farr took the downtown seat with just 21 percent of the vote, beating Matt Jelly by less than 170 votes, but Farr then swept two-thirds of the ballots in 2014. In fact, it is rare for a councillor to be denied a second term.
The advantages of incumbency include higher profile and the credit accumulated from addressing constituent questions and concerns. Though most of this work is done by city staff, the calls and responses flow through the councillors’ offices, and in some instances the elected official even takes over staff functions to curry favour. For example, some councillors personally deliver blue boxes to constituents.
Funding – especially from corporate donations – also seems to come much easier for incumbents. Farr got much more when he ran as an incumbent. Judi Partridge self-funded her first election victory but collected numerous donations for her re-election campaign. And donations flowing to incumbents, at least in Hamilton, can also still be re-distributed to supporters via gift cards and lavish post-election parties.
Only four incumbent councillors have been defeated in Hamilton in this century. Marvin Caplan was pushed out by Brian McHattie and Anne Bain lost to Phil Bruckler in 2003. Bruckler than lost narrowly to Brad Clark in 2006, and Dave Mitchell fell to Brenda Johnson in the 2010 election.
Mitchell had been battered by repeated scandals including two official council censures – one for trying to use his position to avoid a speeding ticket, and one where he lobbied colleagues about a personal severance application despite admitting a conflict of interest. Nevertheless, Mitchell garnered nearly 40 percent and lost his seat by less than 250 ballots.
The power of incumbency is not limited to Hamilton. A review of the last four Toronto elections found 93 percent of sitting councillors kept their seats, including 36 out of 37 in the most recent contest. That advantage explains why races without an incumbent like attract such a large number of candidates – in the case of last month’s mountain by-election almost as many (22) as the number (25) who unsuccessfully challenged all council incumbents combined in 2014.
A ranked balloting system now being offered to cities by the provincial government for implementation as early as 2018 seems to offer a higher chance that voters actually get the representation they seek. It would let them identify their order of preference of the candidates leading to a counting process that drops the lowest scoring candidate and redistributes his or her votes to the remaining ones until one person achieves at least 50 percent of the ballots cast.
Graefe sees some value to ranked balloting, especially in a by-election, but warns that it can also provide even more advantages to incumbents who may win by collecting more second place votes. He reviewed several voting system options for the Hamilton chapter of the Council of Canadians but warned that residents need to be actively demanding electoral reform to actually get it to happen, despite promises from the federal government that it is committed to changing the voting system.