Indignant councillors have vowed to fix the way Torontonians register to vote - it just isn't clear yet how that's going to happen.
Thanks to a dysfunctional system in which the provincial body responsible for assessing property values also collects resident information used to compile cities' voter lists, hundreds of thousands of tenants become inadvertently disenfranchised come election time.
"I'm outraged," Mayor David Miller said yesterday. "There is a very serious structural, fundamental problem with the way our voters' lists are prepared."
Executive committee passed a slate of motions to address the problem - from trying to commit the Municipal Property Assessment Corporation responsible to improving its information collecting, to having the city conduct its own door-to-door voter registration campaign and multiple outreach initiatives leading up to next fall's municipal election.
What remains uncertain is how, exactly, this raft of fixes is going to work. Under provincial law, the city isn't allowed to enumerate its own voter lists - that's MPAC's job. But MPAC's information collecting system favours homeowners at the expense of tenants, who are often overlooked or excluded in the broken telephone between tenant, landlord, property assessment corporation and city clerks.
There also doesn't appear to be nearly enough money in cash-strapped city coffers to pay for the bold initiatives the committee put forward yesterday: A door-to-door campaign alone would cost several million dollars (MPAC estimated in 2003 that it would cost $24-million to canvass the entire province).
The city's election committee has a total of three staff and $429,000 dedicated to outreach this year.
In the long term, Mr. Miller said, the province needs to rethink the way it collects this information.
"Why should the property assessment company evaluate whether someone's on a voters' list? It makes no sense whatsoever…But we can certainly make some significant efforts."