By Armchair Mayor

There’s gotta be a better way to break a tie vote for mayor

Oct 24, 2018 | 5:07 AM

KAMLOOPS — THERE WERE A LOT OF close votes in last Saturday’s civic election but none so close as the race for mayor in Peachland, our Okanagan neighbor to the south.

At the end of counting on election night, Harry Gough had defeated incumbent Cindy Fortin by one vote but there was an automatic recount. The result? A tie at 804 votes apiece, the mis-count apparently being caused by a ballot misfed into a voting machine.

According to the Local Government Act, there must now be a judicial recount. If it confirms the tie, the election will be decided, believe it or not, by drawing from names in a hat or, in official terminology, the “drawing of lot.”

Could there possibly be any worse method for deciding who the mayor will be for a town of close to 5,000 people, or any other town? There’s gotta be a better way, and I can think of several.

First of all, if one candidate doesn’t live in the municipality, and one does, award the election to the one who does. In this case, Gough lives in West Kelowna. The win should go to Fortin.

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A second way would be a rule that the tie goes to the incumbent who, after all, has experience.

Another would be to hold a run-off election between Fortin and Gough. In my view, the cost would be worth it in the name of democracy.

And yet another way would be to use a ranked ballot in municipal elections. A ranked ballot, by the way, has nothing directly to do with proportional representation. It can be adulterated into a version of prop rep but it’s not the same thing.

In its pure, simplest form, in which voters simply rank their choices in order, it would guarantee that tie votes— and all the stress and potential unfairness associated with them — would never happen in civic elections.

And the ranked ballot is exactly how London, Ont. elected a new mayor and council this week.

I’m Mel Rothenburger, the Armchair Mayor.