City of Adelaide in the colony of South Australia
Its first election saw the first use of a form of PR (guaranteed minority representation) in the world, according to PR experts Hoag and Hallett.
They say that Adelaide's ground-breaking election system was due to Rowland Hill, son of PR proponent Thomas Wright Hill.
Rowland Hill served on the South Australian Colonization Commission, 1833-1839. Hill like his father Thomas Wright Hill, was a fan of proportional representation. As member of the Colonization Commission, Hill convinced the Commission to give Adelaide an election system that provided for minority representation. Although not STV, the system used was based on the Hare quota.This was said to be the first application of proportional representation to a public election in the world.
The Commission's annual report, written by Hill, said the novel system was to be used to "make timely provision against the arbitrary power that under popular governments the majority exercise over the minority.... [By use of the quorum], parties shall bear the same proportion to each other in the Council that they may bear in the elective body [the electorate]." (Hoag and Hallett, PR (1926), p. 167-171)
Adelaide is sometimes credited with first use of STV, but that is not quite right as ranked votes were not used in the 1840 election.
The election was pivotal in a way as it inspired the young Catherine Helen Spence, daughter of the Adelaide city clerk, and she went on to be one of Australia's leading campaigners for PR.
The Corporation of the City of Adelaide was brought into being on 19 August 1840, by a special Ordinance (Ordinance No. 4 of 1840).
For the city's first election, two different election systems were brought into use, one novel and minorty-representation based, the other old and leaky:
Election by quorum (quota-based election) and Election by Block Voting
Election by quorum (quota-based election):
A member could be elected by being the choice of a quorum -- a group of 31 voluntarily-associated voters, 1/19th of the 589 ratepayers (voters).
Two were elected this way.
Election by Block Voting
Block Voting was used to elect the other 17 members for the 1840-1841 Adelaide city council.
Between 100 and 255 votes were received by each of these candidates.
No candidate received a vote from a majority of voters.
No guarantees of minority representation (other than the minority that perhaps took all the seats).
unlike the two "tradesmen" elected by quorum, the other members were of the middle class or better and were highly regarded by the Governor Grey, an aloof artistocrat, at first suspicious of the elected town council, then actively hostile to it. (Hamilton, Colony, Strange Origins of the One of the Earliest Modern Democracies, p. 154)
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According to a South Australian newspaper of the time, he election went like this:
"The public is also very much indebted to Mr Stanley Stokes, the Returning Officer, for the excellency of his arrangements for the accommodation of the voters, his strict impartiality, and the ability he displayed in the discharge of the arduous duties imposed upon him.
The hustings and polling booths were erected at the intersection of King William Street and Hindley Street, and were gaily decorated with flags with appropriate devices.
On Thursday the quorums, or the minorities, exercised their right, and returned the following representatives, each having thirty-one votes:—
W. Sanders, draper and grocer
—Wakeham, carpenter.
An attempt to get up another minority [quorum] failed.
Yesterday was the general election. The polling proceeded with great spirit, especially towards four o'clock, at which hour the voting ceased. A large number of citizens did not vote, or were too late in attendance. At six o'clock, Mr Stokes declared the following seventeen citizens duly elected..."
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43 candidates stood for the 17 seats.
the remaining eligible voters (589-62, used up in the quorums) it seems could cast up to 17 votes each and 4000 votes were cast in all.
the winners received from 255 to 114 votes each. no one took votes from a majority of voters.
a rough total of 2700 votes were used to elect successful candidates
The other 26 received fewer votes, ranging from 107 down to several who got just 1 vote.
about 1300 votes were cast for the unsuccessful candidates.
(info provided by article in South Australian Register, Oct. 31, 1840, p. 2
now available online at: https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/27441962 )
This election was famously witnessed by young Catherine Helen Spence, and helped inspire her to a life-long campaign for PR.
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The difference between the Block Voting vote tallies and the quorum winners, which required just 31 votes, was criticized and it seems one of the two quorum winners said he would not be elected under that route again. The other did not make such a promise, which was described in the press as being set on course to "avail himself of a pitiful minority, to satisfy an equally pitiful ambition." (Hamilton, Colony, p. 151)
But Adelaide (and everywhere else) has never again used the quorum method to allocate seats so it is a moot point.
Anyways, the problem was that Block Votong was used for the remainig seats. If each voter at that stage had been able to castno more than one vote (SNTV), then the vote tallies used to fill the remaining seats would have been much closer to the quorum winners, and representation of multiple minorities would have been achieved in that stage as well as by the quorum route.
possibly Fisher would have still taken 255 votes.
and then the other 42 candidates would have shared the remaining 250 votes.
each candidate would have taken at least one vote. it is possible that those who got just one vote plumped and were plumped against.
and then that means in the election if 7 plumped
500 or so voters cast 4000 votes.
obviously many did not vote all 17 choices.
The election was held without secret voting, and without women voting,
but was more orderly than it might have been.
So it is said to be the first democratic election because it was the first election held in Australia to fill a representative chamber, not necssarily due to the fine democratic attributes of the election, as we see them today.
due to small tax base due being such a new colony, and due to expenses incurred by building needed infrastructure and extras, town soon fell into financial troubles ...
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full article from online source [City of Adelaide website]
The Ordinance was passed by Governor Gawler and his Executive Council in accordance with the wishes of the South Australian Colonisation Commissioners who had been responsible for organising the settlement of the province. They had made it clear that elected municipal institutions should be established in any town which reached a population of 2,000 inhabitants.
The Ordinance was modelled on the English Municipal Corporations Act of 1835, although the voting procedures contained in it were both novel and complex.
The Ordinance made provision for the regular election of a Council to consist of 19 "Common Councilmen" of whom four were to be Aldermen elected by the Councilmen, with a Mayor to be elected in turn from among the Aldermen (Clause XVI of the Ordinance No. 4 of 1840).
To be eligible for election to the new Council, a citizen was required to be the owner or occupier of a house within the municipality with a yearly value of at least £50, or possessed of personal property to the value of at least £500, and not to be likely to be pecuniarily interested in any foreseeable contract that may arise from the deliberations of the new Council (Clause XII of Ordinance No. 4 of 1840).
Only those ratepayers who were male persons of 21 years of age or more were to be permitted to vote in the election for this first Council. In addition, they had to have been resident in the colony for at least six months, and they had to be the owner or tenant of property within the City valued at not less than £20 per annum. And to qualify they must be living within a radius of seven miles of the City centre (Clause IV of Ordinance No. 4 of 1840).
The boundaries of the City for the purposes of the Ordinance were defined as being the inner limits of the Park Lands originally laid down by the survey and delineated in Colonel Light’s Plan of Adelaide.
The method of electing the Councilmen was unusual in that the Ordinance enable the electors to voluntarily form themselves into as many electoral sections or "quorums" as there were candidates.
The idea of dividing the City into a number of separate electoral wards had not been evolved at this stage and, moreover, the Colonisation Commissioners had suggested that, with the object of giving the minorities a vote, the total number of voters should be divided by the number of Common Councilmen to be returned, the resulting groups to be called "quorums". The electors were therefore required to band themselves together voluntarily and in groups of their own choosing (Clause X of Ordinance No. 4 of 1840).
Each electoral quorum, provided that the members could agree upon a unanimous vote, could return one member to the Council.
If the full number of members was not elected by such quorums, then the balance was to be elected by the ratepayers who had not previously voted in quorums, but each voter could only vote for one candidate. (Clause XVI of Ordinance No. 4 of 1840). [This clause may have been intended to say that each voter would have only one vote in the election of the remaining seats (which would have produced the election system known as SNTV), but was taken to mean just that those who had put their names down as part of a quorum could not vote again.
The election of the remaining seats was held using Block Voting. This is not stated anywhere but must be the case -- how else could less than 589 voters cast something like 4000 votes?]
Half the Aldermen, including the Mayor as an Alderman, were to remain in office for two years without re-election, while the Councilmen had to retire annually (Clause XVII of Ordinance No. 4 of 1840).
Not surprisingly, in practice the system of electing Councilmen proved cumbersome and confusing. According to W.C.D. Veale, a former Town Clerk of Adelaide whose manuscript history of Adelaide’s early municipal development has not been published and is held by the City Archives (Accession 0029 Item 14 Municipal Affairs Adelaide 1840 – 1852), a Voters' Roll was compiled by the Returning Officer (Stanley Stokes) who, after finding the number of voters to be 557, publicly announced that a quorum would consist of 31 voters (the City Archives holds a copy of the original 1840 Voter’s Roll).
However, only two such quorums assembled on election day, 30 October 1840, at the single polling booth, which was located in the centre of the intersection of King William, Hindley-Rundle Streets, where they advanced in a body and signed their names on the forms on which their candidates name appeared.
Thus only two members of the first City Council were returned by quorums, and there remained 17 members to be elected by the normal ballot. [using Block Voting]
In all 43 candidates stood for election, with Fisher heading the poll with 255 votes.
Accordingly, the next day, 31 October 1840, the successful candidates were summoned by the Returning Officer to the South Australian Club in Hindley Street, where James Hurtle Fisher, the former Resident Commissioner of the province, was elected Mayor of Adelaide.
The first meeting of the Council took place on 4 October 1840, in the office of Robert Thomas, a local printer, located in Hindley Street West, where the first officers to be appointed by the new Council were the City Messenger (William Mc Bean) and a temporary Town Clerk (William Edwards, who remained in the job until 28 October, when David Spence was appointed to the role).
First Adelaide City Council Elected 30 October 1840
Mayor: James Hurtle Fisher elected by the elected members
Aldermen: James Hurtle Fisher; A.W. Davis; Matthew Smillie; George Stevenson. elected by the elected members
Councilmen: N. Hailes; J. Brown; C. Mann; J. Hallett; W. Blyth; W.G. Lambert; H. Watson; T. Wilson; E. Rowlands; E.W. Andrews; J. Frew; W.H. Neale; S. East, W. Sanders; J.Y. Wakeham.
The City Archives holds the Minute Book of the meetings of this first City Council Minutes book – 1840 to 1843 (PDF).
(Sanders and Wakeham are in bold to designate that they were the ones who had been elected by quorum. Sanders and Wakeham obviously were held out of the aldermanic and mayor position.)
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(To compare this instance of Block Voting against SNTV, see my blog on Vanuatu's 2020 election.)
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