Bringing in ranked ballots for municipal elections probably won't affect voter turnout, says the author of a new study looking at the demographic factors behind low turnout in Toronto's elections.

But there is another policy change Queen's Park could make to increase turnout: extend the franchise to permanent residents, as requested by Toronto city council last year.

"Ranked ballots are a good idea for their own purpose, but will it lead to more ballots being cast? Maybe at the margins, but not a heck of a lot," said Myer Siemiatycki, the Ryerson University professor who wrote the study.

In a recent mandate letter to cabinet, Premier Kathleen Wynne said she wants her government to give municipalities the option of using ranked ballots in the 2018 local elections.

In a ranked-ballot system, voters cast ballots for their top three or more candidates – not just for one. If no candidate gets a majority, the last-place candidate drops off the ballot and votes are immediately tallied again until their is a majority winner.

"In the grand scheme of the 50 per cent plus who are not voting in Toronto, I don’t think a heck of a lot of them are not voting because they feel so much loyalty to one candidate who's a longshot that they just don't think it's worth it," Siemiatycki said.

He said the key to increasing turnout is to better engage neighbourhoods with large immigrant populations. If the provincial government wants to help with that, he said, they should act on the Toronto city council resolution passed last year that called on the province to amend the Municipal Elections Act and allow permanent residents to vote.

"You've got a big whack of people in Toronto who aren't captured by our study because they don't have the right to vote," he said. "From the census, about 15 per cent of Toronto's population are non-citizens. I think the push for permanent resident voting could have some really interesting impacts on political participation and voter turnout."

The study, conducted by Siemiatycki and geographic analyst Sean Marshall for the Maytree charitable foundation, concluded there is a negative correlation between city wards with large immigrant populations and voter turnout. The 10 lowest-turnout wards in Toronto have above-average immigrant populations, while nine of the top 10 turnout wards have fewer immigrants than average.

It also concluded that contrary to popular belief, there is not a significant correlation between voter turnout and the income levels of wards. Furthermore, the proportion of tenants and homeowners in a ward has no effect at all on how many people cast ballots.

Siemiatycki said he expects the province will be lobbied in the lead-up to the 2018 election to act on the Toronto city council resolution to give permanent residents the vote, and that there may be reason to think Wynne will be receptive to it.

He pointed out that the mandate letter to Municipal Affairs and Housing Minister Ted McMeekin that explicitly mentions ranked ballots also contains an open-ended phrase about ensuring the Municipal Elections Act "meets the needs of communities."

Ultimately, he said, the biggest effect of extending the franchise in this way would be the message it sends to immigrant communities about the value placed on their role in Canadian democracy.

"Part of the reason why there's this correlation between immigrant populations and lower voting turnout, I think, is that we don't do enough to signal to immigrants that their participation is important and wanted," Siemiatycki said. "There is a large pool of eligible voters who aren't voting, and that's playing out at all levels of government. So what could we signal and message that would bring more people out to the polls, and tap into the large proportion who aren't voting?"

Ranked ballots won’t help turnout, but extending franchise to permanent residents would: study author

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