Ten years ago now, I was elected as a Trustee to the Toronto District School Board (TDSB). It was a part-time, after-work position that usually has pretty low public visibility (although we hit the news cycle quite often in my three years there). While some might consider it the minor leagues of municipal politics, it was a big deal for me. At the time, I was the youngest person elected to the position since the creation of the TDSB. It was also my first direct experience with election regulation.
I was elected in a by-election to fill a vacancy one year into a four-year term. My predecessor had just been elected as a Member of Provincial Parliament for the same district. Usually, school board trustees in Ontario are elected on the same municipal election date as the mayor and city council. This one-off by-election did not get much media attention, though, and consequently had a very low turnout (as I had expected it would).
In the end, 11% of the eligible voters showed up. One in five of them voted for me. While I received less than 20% of the vote, because there were 17 candidates, I had the largest tally and won. Three years later, I received five times as many votes and a larger share of the total. But I lost. The experience lit up a fascination inside me for electoral rules. When an election is held, what the ballot looks like, how many representatives get elected, who gets to draw the district boundaries, the seemingly-obscure regulations that no one thinks much about (at least back in 2012) have an enormous impact on which policies eventually get implemented in society.
When Justin Trudeau won the 2015 Canadian federal election, his campaign platform included a promise that “2015 will be the last federal election conducted under the first-past-the-post voting system.” He would go on to break that promise but, in the meantime, understanding what an important fundamental shift it could be, I began learning about alternative voting systems on my own time. I even started writing an amateur blog about the topic in the Canadian context.
In parallel, Armenia held a constitutional referendum in 2015. I remember trying to read up on what the proposed changes were. The few articles that did cover the topic just mentioned that it represented a shift from a semi-presidential to a parliamentary model of governance. Some claimed that it was Serzh Sargsyan’s attempt to remain in power past his two-term limit, while others reported that that was not his intention. I remember feeling frustrated that I couldn’t get any deeper analysis about the process, especially not in English. In short, this Substack is about filling that void so that the next reader in this new round of constitutional reforms can have a source to turn to.
I did travel to Armenia in the spring of 2017 solely to be an election observer for that first election under the new constitution. I had to walk in to the Central Electoral Commission office to find someone to explain to me how it was decided which open list candidates get a seat—there were no written explainers and I hadn’t yet learned how to look up Armenian legislation directly. Later that year, I started a Master in Public Administration degree at Harvard University and made election regulation my primary focus.
I came to Yerevan in the summer of 2018 to follow the work of the Parliamentary Working Group on Electoral Reform and wrote a series of articles about the process for EVN Report. Since receiving my MPA in 2019, I have been taking part in the process directly, trying to offer my input to the decision-makers.
If you find electoral processes to be boring, no worries. But if you are part of the small group that wants to dive into it, I hope you subscribe to this newsletter and we get a chance to connect.