You made it! The last contestant standing on an old-school game show. "Behind Door Number One" your charming host reveals, "a pile of rocks!" Behind Door Two, he grins, "a slightly larger pile of rocks!" And, gesturing to the last door with a glimmer of gold pouring out from beneath, "or will our lucky winner pick the million-dollar mystery prize?" It's a no-brainer. But as you reach for the knob, the host grabs your wrist. "What are you doing?" he hisses. "You're only allowed to pick between the first two doors!"

Hardly seems fair, does it. But municipalities in British Columbia get the same treatment when it comes to their local governments. The province strong-arms cities, towns, villages, and districts into using bloc voting to elect their councils, a poor fit for representation in local elections. Ward (or "district") voting, the only current alternative, appears a bit more generous but has its own weighty problems: spoiled elections and two-party dominance.

This year, as a special provincial committee studies election reform, might it finally come to pass that local governments get a glimpse behind that third door? Gold-standard elections, using the new best-in-class model now operational in Portland Oregon, are so close to being in reach: only a few lines of provincial law stand between municipal governments and better representation.

British Columbia's standing election laws simply don't give local councils a fair shot at better elections. Bloc voting and ward voting - the only two choices municipalities are allowed - are hardly ideal for representing voters.

Also known as plurality at-large voting, bloc voting is BC's default voting method for local councils. If 10 seats on the body are up for a bloc vote election, voters get to pick 10 candidates. The 10 winners are the ones with the most votes.

The problem?

In partisan contests, bloc voting often means the most popular party will win outsized representation on the council. Take the Vancouver City Council election of 1996 for example. The Non-Partisan Association (a center-right party, despite the name) won slightly more than 50 percent of the total vote, but took 100 percent of the seats.

By contrast, if voters had the same preferences under a proportional model, the Non-Partisan Association likely would have wound up with half of the seats, roughly equal to their vote share. Other parties - including the Coalition of Progressive Electors, Vancouver Organized Independent Civic Electors, and others - would have split the remaining five seats, giving their communities a voice in local government.

With turnout perpetually low in BC municipal elections, it's not out of the question that an extreme faction could seize control of most or all seats in a single election. As authors for Fair Vote Canada wrote in 2022, the winner-takes-all nature of council elections causes sudden and extreme policy swings, which can be expensive for taxpayers and create uncertainty for the individuals, communities, and businesses that local policies impact.

BC offers local governments only one alternative to bloc voting, which might provide slightly more accurate representation on a council, but creates headaches of its own.

Municipalities also have the option to elect councillors partially or entirely in districts, also known as wards. Wards that elect a single councillor operate under simple plurality rules (most-votes-wins), while multi-winner wards must use bloc voting. So far, only the District of Lake Country has adopted wards, but larger cities - including Burnaby, Surrey, and Vancouver - have debated or proposed converting to ward voting.

While wards guarantee geographic areas will have representation on a council, they create concerns for fairness and representation. First off: if wards split neighborhoods or communities between districts, those communities might not win representation at all, so local governments must take precautions to draw maps impartially and fairly. (The ac...