Vote YES Yukon on CBC Radio’s Yukon Morning
Yesterday, Sean from Vote YES Yukon was on CBC Radio’s Yukon Morning with Elyn Jones. You can listen to the interview online here.
Photo credit Michael P.
From the interview:
We’re supporting the “yes” vote in the plebiscite coming up on November 3, in support of ranked voting, which is the recommendation that the Citizens’ Assembly on Electoral Reform put together last year.
We all think that ranked voting would be a really neat way of improving politics in the Yukon, making it a bit more welcoming and collaborative instead of more divisive.
It means that whoever ultimately gets elected has the support of more than 50% of the people in their riding – which isn’t usually the case nowadays.
By changing to a ranked voting system, the incentives for political candidates and political parties are suddenly really different than they are right now. With our current system of first-past-the-post, it’s often a very divisive kind of politics. Of saying, ‘vote for us, everyone else is terrible, vote for our people’.
But with ranked voting, by being able to choose your first choice, and your second choice, and your third choice, it means that political candidates and political parties are actually motivated to appeal to everybody. To say, ‘even if you’re not going to be our first choice, we’d love to be your second choice. We’d even love to be your third choice.’
And that means that it’s a more collaborative, more welcoming political environment, where it’s not just about ‘our party versus everyone’. It’s about saying ‘we want to be a party, or we want to be a candidate, who appeals to all of the voters who are in our constituency.’
We’re a strictly non-partisan, volunteer-run campaign, and we’re really just excited to reach out to everyday Yukoners and say ‘how can we make Yukon politics better’. And, how can we build on the really great work that the Citizens’ Assembly did to figure out what options – because there are a lot of really interesting electoral reform systems out there – and they did the hard work of figuring out that ranked voting would work really well for the Yukon, for the geography and population and unique territory that we are.
Electoral reform is something that people have talked about for decades, across Canada, and I think the Yukon has a really neat opportunity to be the first territory or province to make it happen. I hope that if there’s a really positive “yes” result, that all the parties will accept that, and do the work in the next government to implement it for our next elections down the road.
People are excited [about the campaign]! People are often a bit disillusioned or disengaged from our current politics. People often feel like their votes don’t really matter. And by moving to ranked vote, it means that people’s votes are more meaningful. It’s more exciting. Even if you aren’t excited about the top or most likely candidates, your vote means a lot more under ranked voting.
I’ve just been really surprised and really grateful at how excited people are. When I’m talking about the Vote YES campaign, people are like ‘thank you for doing this, thanks for getting the ball rolling’. And they’re excited to see it happen.
The biggest challenge for the campaign is that I wouldn’t be surprised if a lot of Yukoners go to vote on November 3, get their plebiscite ballot, and look at it and say ‘what is this, I’ve never seen this before’. My hope is that no one goes into the election cold about what the plebiscite is. And Elections Yukon has some really great resources, they’ve got a neat how-to video about what the plebiscite is and what ranked voting is.
And I just hope that people have the chance to learn about it and take a look, so that they go in knowing what the options are. And, hopefully voting “yes”!