COMMENTARY: Does ‘democracy’ have to be so complicated ?

It’s only a few days after the Conservative leadership race and already, some Conservatives are complaining about the voting system that was used.

To be clear, the complaints aren’t about who got elected, but the voting process itself.

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The Tories used a ranked balloting system to elect their new leader and it’s pretty clear that many of the 141,000 Conservatives who voted didn’t understand how the system was supposed to work.

Ranked balloting only works if the voter fills out their first, second, third choices and so on, all the way down the list of the 14 contenders.

But, by the time they reached the 13th ballot, 23,000 voters were eliminated because they didn’t fill out the entire ballot.

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Some say the problem was that there were just too many candidates running; others say that the ranked balloting system is just too confusing for voters to figure out.

Of course, the first reaction is to blame the voters for not filling out the entire ballot, but how fair is it to ask a voter to rank their 10th or 11th choice if they know little to nothing about those candidates?

The whole process had many Tories pining for the traditional system, namely, one member, one vote.

One veteran Conservative wondered why they even changed the voting system.

Maybe we can address that with another old saying; if it ain’t broke, don’t try to fix it.

Bill Kelly is the host of Bill Kelly Show on AM 900 CHML and a commentator for Global News.