You are here
Ontarions to vote on electoral reforms Oct. 10th
From
Elections Ontario
At present Ontario is divided into 107 electoral districts and uses an electoral system called First Past the Post.
In each district, each voter gets one vote to choose which candidate they feel should win a seat in the provincial legislature. One vote. One ballot.
In an election using the First Past the Post system, the candidate with the most votes wins and will be the representative for the electoral district in the provincial legislature.
After the election, the political party that wins the most electoral districts is normally asked to form a government.
What you will be asked to consider
One of the electoral systems you will be asked to consider during Ontario’s referendum is called Mixed Member Proportional. It is called a mixed system, because it combines two voting systems: a First-Past-the-Post system and a Proportional Representation system.
How does Mixed Member Proportional work?
If this system is accepted, Ontarians will have two votes in future elections: one for a ‘Local Member’ and one for a political party.
The provincial legislature would have 129 seats: Local Members’ would fill 90 seats while ‘List Members’ would fill 39 seats.
The political party with the largest number of seats in the legislature, including ‘Local Members’ and ‘List Members’, is asked to form a government.
In each electoral district, one vote would be used to elect a ‘Local Member’ using a First-Past-the-Post system. The candidate with the most votes in an electoral district wins.
The other vote would be for a political party. Votes for parties will be used to determine the number of ‘List Members’ each party gets. This is the proportional representation part.
If a political party is entitled to more seats than it won locally, ‘List Members’ are elected to make up the difference. ‘List Members’ can only be elected from a political party that received more than 3% of these votes.
In the end, a political party’s overall share of seats will roughly equal its share of the total votes for parties in the province.
Anyone who meets the rules for eligibility can become a candidate for election as a ‘Local Member’. Some candidates are called “independents” while others represent a political party.
‘List Members’ are candidates from any registered political party. Before an election each political party prepares an ordered list of candidates they would like considered as ‘List Members’.
These lists, and the way they are created, would be made public well in advance of any election in a Mixed Member Proportional system.