Last year, Catherine Baquero won the lottery-but not the regular kind.

The fourth-year student was selected to serve on the Ontario Citizens’ Assembly on Electoral Reform, which is in the process of suggesting changes to the way Ontario elects its political leaders.

In April 2006, 124,000 letters were sent to randomly selected registered voters. The letters were asking to respond if they were interested in being a select group of people-the Ontario Citizens’ Assembly on Electoral Reform.

Out of 12,000 replies, 1,200 were invited to attend selection meetings all across Ontario. One person from each riding was selected at random to serve on the Citizens’ Assembly. The result was a smorgasbord of Ontarians: teachers, IT specialists, small business owners, and students-like Bacquero.

If the Citizens’ Assembly, 103 strong, recommends a change to Ontario’s first-past-the-post electoral system, Ontario’s voters will have their say on the proposal at the upcoming provincial election this fall.

Critics charge that the outcomes of provincial elections do not accurately represent the will of the people. Smaller parties, such as the Green Party and the NDP, often earn a decent proportion of votes, but earn far fewer seats.

The assembly is currently holding a series of public meetings to develop its plan. It met on Jan. 25, at the YMCA Auditorium.

One of the many presenters the assembly heard from was Christopher Twardawa, a local politico who has drawn up his own proposal for electoral reform. A hefty 68-page document, he has modestly dubbed it the Christopher Twardawa Electoral System Solution.

The CTESS would have candidates at the riding level elected through a preferential voting system, where voters rank their favoured candidates.

At the provincial level, though, the winning party would be the one that garners the most votes overall. This winning party would then be automatically assigned 60 per cent of the votes in the assembly, irrespective of the number of ridings that party carries; proportional representation would then be used to assign the remaining 40 per cent of votes to opposition parties.

So, theoretically, if the party that garnered the most votes provincially won only 30 of 100 ridings, its 30 lawmakers would cast the equivalent of 60 votes in Parliament.

Twardawa defends this voting system by noting its similarities to the dual-share structure used in corporate boardrooms.

Another participant at the meeting argued that the current system is dated and paternalistic, and inhibits women from engaging themselves politically.

The first Citizens’ Assembly in Canada was set up in British Columbia in 2003. The body proposed a new voting system for the province, called Single Transferrable Vote, which mixed elements of proportional representation and first-past-the-post.

Though nearly 58 per cent of B.C. voters endorsed the proposed changes in a referendum in 2005, the vote failed as it did not attain the required 60 per cent support.