A municipal party system may make it easier for voters in Toronto to pick from long lists of council candidates, although it comes with a number of pitfalls, says a longtime political watcher in Vancouver, a city in which such a system is in place.

There are at least 11 wide-open races out of the 44 seats up for grabs during the Oct. 25 election due to an abnormally high rate of retirements by incumbents.

Some of those races feature several candidates, all of whom are not formally associated with any party.

In Vancouver's system on the other hand, there are no wards — voters are given a long list of candidates from which they select one mayor and 10 councillors, all of whom are associated with a party.

"Often if you read biographies of independent candidates what you see people doing is trying to figure out: 'Where does this person really stand?,'" said Frances Bula, a journalist who has followed Vancouver politics for about 16 years. "How are the going to vote on particular issues? And that party brand really gives them a very easy road map to follow," said Bula.

One candidate running for council in Toronto says she keeps fielding questions from voters about her party affiliation.

"One of the first questions people ask me is: 'what party are you running with?,' because it's a political shorthand. It helps people place you on the political spectrum and then they have stronger sense of comfort for where you're coming from," said Karen Sun, who is in a race with 10 others for the seat that has been vacated by Joe Pantalone, who is now running for mayor.

Ryerson University professor Myer Siemiatycki, who is an expert on municipal politics, said there's currently too much information for voters to process.

A system where "either what we think of as strong party attachments, or even informal networks where we had sense of who stood for what and who they were aligned with," could work better for Toronto, he said.

But in the past 30 years, there have been four attempts in Vancouver to switch to a ward system like the one that is in place in Toronto, said Bula.

People have complained that elections have become "exclusively about party brand identification." That has caused campaign costs to soar. The Vision Vancouver party, for example, spent $2 million in the last campaign, costs that an independent municipal candidate may not be able to afford, said Bula.

Proponents of a ward system in Vancouver argue that more councilors from ethnic minorities, who tend to be concentrated in one part of the city could be elected, said Bula. There is a large Indo-Canadian community in Vancouver, but there have been no city councillors elected from that community, she noted.

And voter turnout in Vancouver's 2008 municipal election in 2008 was 31 per cent among eligible voters.

Toronto's turnout in the 2006 election was around 41 per cent.