The Tikkun Project
Lesson
4
Is Our Electoral System the Best Fit?
Concept
Understanding how votes convert into power reveals whether "majority rules" and "democracy" mean the same thing under every system.
Focus Question
How does Toronto choose its mayor and council? How does Israel choose its government? And does the system used change whether the outcome reflects what most people actually wanted?
Knowledge & Understanding Goals
Social Studies, People and Environments Strand B — The Role of Government and Responsible Citizenship, Grade 5: Compare Canada's electoral system to another system and evaluate the relationship between votes cast and outcomes achieved.
Mathematics, Data Literacy Strand D, Grade 5: Collect, organize, and represent data to compare how vote share translates into seats or representation under different systems.
Thinking & Learning Skills
ATL — Thinking Skills: Weighing evidence on both sides of a genuinely contested question rather than settling for a single "right answer."
ATL — Research Skills: Tracking a real, unfolding current event over time and updating a position as new information arrives.
Learner Profile: Open-Minded, Balanced.
Context
This lesson is placed early and deliberately Toronto's municipal election (mayor and 25 councillors, first-past-the-post) lands October 26, 2026, and Israel's Knesset election (120 seats, nationwide proportional representation, coalition government) lands October 27, 2026, right around when this unit is likely running. Since neither result is known yet when this lesson is written or taught, it's built to teach students what to watch for, not to declare an outcome and it deliberately launches a running "Election Watch" log that Lessons 5, 6, 7, and 11 come back to.
Lesson Outline
STARTING THE ELECTION WATCH
Introduce the two real elections happening this fall: Toronto's municipal election (mayor + 25 councillors, one per ward) on October 26, and Israel's Knesset election (120 seats, nationwide) on October 27. Start a class "Election Watch" log — a bulletin board or shared thought-book section — where students or the teacher add a headline, poll result, or fact as it happens. Explain this log will be revisited later in the unit, once real results are in.
LEARNING HOW TORONTO ELECTS ITS GOVERNMENT
Explain first-past-the-post: in each of Toronto's 25 wards, voters choose one councillor from several candidates, and whoever gets the most votes wins that seat — even if most voters in the ward preferred someone else combined. The mayor is elected the same way, city-wide. Using a simple invented example (e.g., a ward with 3 candidates splitting 40%, 35%, and 25% of the vote), show that the winner can take the seat with support from well under half the voters.
LEARNING HOW ISRAEL ELECTS ITS GOVERNMENT
Explain proportional representation: voters across the whole country vote for a party, not a local candidate, and the 120 Knesset seats are divided up to match each party's share of the national vote as closely as possible. No party has ever won a majority of seats outright in Israel's history, so after the election, parties negotiate to form a coalition government together.
WEIGHING THE FAIRNESS QUESTION
Pose the claim: "First-past-the-post is a fair way to choose a government." Draw a tug-of-war diagram on the board; students add pieces of evidence pulling toward "Yes, fair" or "No, not fair" (e.g., pulling toward fair: produces a clear local representative, usually gives a stable single-party government, easy to understand; pulling toward not-fair: winners can take a seat without majority support, votes for smaller parties can feel "wasted"). Students also add open questions — things they'd want to know before deciding (e.g., "What would Toronto's results look like under ranked ballot instead?").
Introduce ranked ballot as a middle option — voters rank candidates in order of preference, and if no one gets a majority of first-choice votes, the last-place candidate is eliminated and their votes redistributed, repeating until someone has a majority. Note that a few Canadian municipalities (e.g., London, Ontario, in 2018) have used ranked ballots for local elections.
WRAP-UP
Discuss: given what we now know about how Toronto's and Israel's systems work, what specifically should we watch for as results come in over the next few weeks? (E.g., does the winning mayoral candidate have a real majority, or just a plurality? How many parties end up needed to form Israel's governing coalition, and does that look stable?) Add these questions to the Election Watch log as things to check back on.
Notes for Teaching and Evaluation
Tug for Truth (Project Zero thinking routine): a better fit here than a straight debate, because "is FPTP fair" isn't a claim with one correct answer — the routine is explicitly designed to hold evidence on both sides visible at once, rather than pushing students toward a premature verdict, which matters since the class will keep revisiting this question as real election results arrive.
Election Watch log: deliberately built as an ongoing artifact rather than a one-lesson activity, because the material genuinely can't be finished the day it's introduced — the elections haven't happened yet. Revisited explicitly in Lesson 5 ("does this news change how you'd rank the systems we're comparing?"), Lesson 6, Lesson 7, and Lesson 12 (final reflection).