Effective Voting - the Basis of Good Municipal Government.
Proportional Representation Committee of Ontario
Toronto. [1898] 31 pages
(reprinted from Citizen and Country 1898)
Pages 30-31 were devoted to a proposed bill formulated by John Idington, QC, of Stratford (Ontario) that, if passed and made into law, would allow any municipality in Ontario that used at-large districting to use STV.
In 1898 John Idington was chairman of the Proportional Representation Committee of Ontario. John Idington (1840–1928) was a Stratford lawyer and a judge in the Supreme Court of Canada, 1905-1927. (Wikipedia has an article on his life)
He was author of Going it Blind : to the electors of the city of Stratford ... are you going to go it blind? The Board of Trade submits a Water Supply By-law, worse if possible, than that you overwhelmingly defeated about four years ago.. (an appeal to Stratford votes to not vote for a new water treatment plant, dated 1903)
[haven't found anything else he wrote in favour of P.R. but still searching...]
Back in 1898, STV was used to elect ten legislators in Tasmania, and list P.R. was used in ten Swiss cantons.
At the time there was no known use of P.R. (or STV) in any municipality, but the booklet said that English school boards were elected by Cumulative Voting, and that executive members of the San Francisco Mechanics' Institute were elected by what was called the Hare-Spence system, "with entire success and complete satisfaction." Seven members were elected in a contest involving 800 to 1000 voters. in 1896, 958 votes were cast and the counting under STV took just two hours and fifteen minutes. (page 15)
As well, the Toronto Trades and Labour Council used STV to elect its executive. (Chapter 5. "An object lesson" (p. 28-30) outlined how the 1898 TLC STV election worked. At the end, the author asked "Is not this Proportional Representation, Effective Voting and Scientific Suffrage?"
Although the author regarded Hare-Spence as "the best all-around plan of Effective Voting," the booklet also outlined the Gove system (p. 24-25), Cumulative Voting and Limited Voting.
It said Cumulative Voting had been used for twenty years to elect English school boards but stated that Alfred Cridge believed that the use of such an imperfect system had actually held up the progress toward P.R.
It said Cumulative Voting was also being used in Illinois but in districts of only three seats. "Such a burlesque on pro-rep only retards progress."
Limited Voting had been used to elect 3 Toronto MLAs with each voter casting two votes.
In New York, Limited Voting had been used where voters cast seven votes to elect 12 members.
But both systems had been dropped by 1898.
The booklet (p. 27-29) outlined how STV had been used successfully to determine the location for a company picnic of the Wm. and J.G. Greey business, Toronto, where 80 workmen worked. (Despite vote transfers, a tie had resulted so a second runoff election had been held with just two options.)
https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=aeu.ark:/13960/t2f76gz2c&view=1up&seq=1 (Hathi trust online CIHM 1419)
(this is only book by this group available on hathi trust)
see Montopedia blog: https://montopedia.wixsite.com/montopedia/post/effective-voting-pro-rep-in-1898-ontario-book
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(this is an excerpt from the Montopedia blog "Timeline of Canadian electoral reform...")
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