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Yukonomist: Improving the Yukon election system

A few points that might help buff the rust off our democracy
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Keith Halliday

Democracy is the worst form of government, Winston Churchill once said, except for all the others that have been tried.

Now that we are talking about reforming the Yukon election system, it’s worth remembering that our current system, for all its dents, rust spots and grinding transmission noises, has got us to the point where we are freer and have more rights, income, public health spending and environmental legislation than any of our ancestors — no matter where they came from on the planet — in the history of the human species.

So we need to consider that there are risks if we mess with our current system.

But better is possible. No one would design our current electoral system as it is if they started from a blank PowerPoint screen.

36 per cent of Yukoners ignored their duty to vote in the last territorial election.

Party leaders and their courtiers selected the candidates for your riding, controlling your menu of choices.

Shadowy donors provided large chunks of money to party leaders in the infamous Yukon “other” category where there is no obligation to reveal their identities. As reported in the Yukon News, over one third of campaign donations in 2023 were raised in this murky channel.

On election day, our first-past-the-post system meant that some members of the Legislature were elected with less than 40 percent of the vote.

The part of the process that works quite well is Elections Yukon, which runs a voting process widely seen as fair and honest.

Then, after the election, citizens are uninvolved in law making for another five years. Unlike our Alaskan friends, we do not do citizen votes on bond issues or important laws.

The Yukon is currently considering changes to its election process. We don’t know what changes our current politicians will approve in the end. The current system has got them where they are now, of course.

But as a thought exercise, here is a fix to each of the problems above.

Voting should be mandatory. If you don’t vote, you get a $100 ticket and you can’t renew your driver’s license until you pay it.

On fixing first past the post and how party leaders pre-define your choices, we should adopt Alaska’s two-round system. 

In Round 1, anyone and their dog can run. Political leaders have no say in your options.

Then the top four candidates make it to Round 2, where there is preference voting. Say there are candidates A, B, C and D running. You like them in that order and rank them that way on your ballot. When Elections Yukon counts the votes, they do it in rounds also. Suppose the riding has 100 votes and A gets 20, B 32, C 33 and D 15.

In our current system, C would win with 33 percent of the vote and spend the next five years annoying you by talking about their mandate from the people.

In Alaska’s system, they would knock D out since they have the least votes and reallocate their votes based on the voters’ second choices. Suppose all D lovers had C as their second choice. Then the results would look like this: A 20, B 32, C48.

Then they would knock A out. If all of A’s second preferences were for B, then the final would be B 52, C 48.

This is called a preference system. It’s a bit more complicated than our current system, but solves those huge leader selection and first-past-the-post problems.

Don’t be distracted by opposition to the preference system in Alaska (where as of writing a citizen proposition to repeal the system is winning with 50.5 percent of the vote with 10 percent of the vote left to count). The reason some powerful political forces don’t like preferential voting is because it favours centrists. It does this by short-circuiting the primary process, which famously favours more extreme candidates popular with the party’s base.

An Alaskan national populist right winger has a much harder time defeating a mainstream candidate in a general election than in a party-only primary.

Some people don’t like preferential voting because you end up with a Legislature of compromises and second choices. People with out-of-mainstream views -- think libertarians, small government radicals, anti-growth environmentalists, anti-vaxers, communists and anti-immigration populists -- tend to end up with fewer seats.

To me, this is a feature, not a bug. An alternative system called proportional representation allocates seats according to popular vote. Say we had 21 ridings as recommended by the Yukon Electoral Boundaries Commission. If an extreme right-wing anti-immigration party gets five percent of the vote, they get a seat in the Legislature.

We have seen how much political trouble such systems generate in other countries. Pick your least favourite political movement, and ask yourself if you would be happy if a politician who really, really wanted to be premier had to keep them happy to stay in office.

On campaign finance reform, the obvious solution is to fix the rules around “other” disclosures. I wouldn’t mind banning corporate, activist group and union donations. A cap on personal donations would be good too.

Finally, I would adopt a law — common in many successful European countries and US states — that citizens can call a citizen vote on specific laws if a certain percentage of voters sign a petition. For example, like last week’s votes on the Alaskan electoral system and Washington’s carbon pricing program. 

The Yukon government’s big change programs would have a better chance of succeeding if politicians and senior officials had to convince Yukoners they actually made sense. The multi-million-dollar reorganization of the health system is an example. Citizens should have a chance to vote on something as consequential as creating a health authority.

The most important vote of all is about the future of our electoral system. The Yukon Legislature should not impose a new version unless Yukoners vote to approve it. 

Keith Halliday is a Yukon economist and the winner of the 2022 Canadian Community Newspaper Award for Outstanding Columnist. His most recent book Moonshadows, a Yukon-noir thriller, is available in Yukon bookstores.