Ranked Ballot System and Desmond Cole

Liberals: Last month the Liberals announced they would allow municipalities to use a ranked ballot system — in which voters can rank candidates in order of preference — to elect local councillors and mayors, according to Toronto Star. It a great idea and one I championed as a board member of the Ranked Ballot Initiative of Toronto. By Desmond Cole Thu., May 12, 2016 As Ontario reviews the voting rules for its 444 municipalities, the governing Liberals have devoted much attention to the issue of how votes should be counted. We should change the method we use to count votes, but reform also includes voter eligibility: who is allowed to cast a vote in a local election, and why Hundreds of thousands of voting-age Ontarians cannot cast a ballot in local elections because they are not citizens and the current rules state that only citizens can vote in a municipal election. During the era of former premier Dalton McGuinty, I served as project coordinator of I Vote Toronto, a campaign to convince Queen Park to extend voting rights to non-citizen permanent residents of Canada. This has got to change — we need to acknowledge that non-citizen residents would derive the same benefits from voting as anyone else and they need and deserve these benefits in a democratic society. (www.immigrantscanada.com). As reported in the news.