Today Fri Sat
It is forcast to be Fog at 11:00 PM EDT on May 24, 2012
Fog
29°/18°		 It is forcast to be Chance of Rain at 11:00 PM EDT on May 25, 2012
Chance of Rain
31°/18°		 It is forcast to be Overcast at 11:00 PM EDT on May 26, 2012
Overcast
26°/15°

7 Comments

news

Streeter: Fulfilling One’s Civic Duty, Or Whatever, Edition

By David Topping

Streeter collects only the finest overheard conversations. Hear something? Send it to streeter@torontoist.com.
20100101Streeter.jpg Overheard by Val Dodge at Ward 29‘s advance poll at 12:30 p.m. on Sunday. A hurried voter, who parks her car in a handicapped spot without an apparent disabled permit but with an “Ironman finisher” bumper sticker, is casting her vote.
Voter, to a polling station worker: Who are all these people on the ballot? I thought there were only five people running for mayor.
Worker: They’re just a bunch of random people who don’t have any chance of winning.
Get more municipal election coverage from Torontoist here.

Filed under: , ,

Report error Send a tip

Comments

  • http://undefined rek

    Media shouldn’t be allowed to cover select candidates to the exclusion of others, at least in the mayoral run. This includes invitation to debates.

  • http://undefined dowlingm

    I think it may be time to set the bar a little higher for mayor. How about opening nominations at the current time but imposing a cut off – say July 1 – where the “playoffs” select only candidates who have in this time found 1,000 citizens to propose that they be placed on the ballot.
    I doubt some of the more engaged candidates like Himy Syed would have much difficulty clearing this bar, and it would lessen the possibility of fiascos like Pantalone only appearing on the electronic advance ballot if you “turn to page 2″. This isn’t a school sports day – not everyone should get a ribbon for participation if it turns the process into a farce.

  • http://undefined mattalexto

    I overheard someone say they knew the election for mayor was coming up but didn’t realize they’d be voting for local councillors too. That was a bit unnerving.
    Maybe we should stagger things. Have one election for mayor and another for councillors two years later.
    Year X – Mayor
    Year X+1 – Provincial
    Year X+2 – Local Councillors
    Year X+3 – Federal
    repeat.
    ?

  • CanadianSkeezix

    Anyone who has gone to court on that basis has run into the little problem of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. It’s a free country.
    While I agree that the media is myopic in its coverage of municipal elections, the bigger evil would be dictating what people can write about or how they must hold public meetings.

  • CanadianSkeezix

    Rather than dictating media content, the better solution would be to adopt some form of preferential ballot/alternative vote system for municipal elections, whereby voters rank their choices and no candidate can win office without at least 50% of the vote. Not only would such a system all but eliminate strategic voting (“we all must vote for Smitherman, even if you don’t like him, or the city will be engulfed in hellfire”), but it would allow voters to pay more attention to all the candidates without needing to worry about “wasting” their ballot.

  • http://undefined rek

    I understand the issue there, but when the media creates the illusion that there are only 5 candidates, they are misleading the electorate and potentially interfering with elections. We wouldn’t tolerate it if the Sun presented Ford and Thomson as the only candidates from the get-go, so why act like nothing is amiss when CTV or Global or G&M say it’s now down to 3 candidates, when over a dozen remain?
    The only 100% legal way around this that I can think of is for Elections Ontario to take out full page ads at regular intervals in all the major dailies listing all legitimate mayoral candidates. But even that’s up to the papers to accept or reject.

  • http://undefined James

    Splitting the Mayor/councilors voting day by 2 years would eliminate candidates saying/being asked which Mayor they support and that question/response helped eliminate some of the 12 councilors in my ward based on who they supported, it would also cost the city twice as much.
    The problem that person had was they don’t read local newspapers or the http://www.toronto.ca/elections/ website or twitter as most citywide media are ignoring the local candidates as well as the 35 other mayor candidates which haven’t withdrawn before the deadline or publicly announced they are throwing their support to someone else.
    http://twitter.com/torontovote/mayorless3 contains 24 candidates found on twitter – minus the 5 in the media all the time.