1952 SC victory in BC result of voter choice under Alternative Voting

Some say the BC SC victory in 1952 was an inadvertent and accidental result of AV.

People rightly realize that with change of voting system, people will vote differently. With Alternative Voting, unlike FPTP, voters are more free to vote for whom they truly desire to see elected - there is an absence of the necessity for strategic voting.

Voter behaviour did change after the 1949 election if compared to the 1952 election. But the change from 1949 to 1952 seems inordinantly large and not to be the simple result of the introduction of AV. In fact it seems Lib/Cons government's switch to AV was caused by fear of rising other party (CCF) and fear of vote splitting of the Lib/Cons semi-coalition under this increased pressure. This pressure made itself evident in the 1952 results.

AV should not be blamed for the Social Credit party's victory in the 1952 election. As it happened, SC, not the feared-to-be-rising CCF, turned out to be the real threat, and AV did not give the Liberal and Conservatives parties the help they thought it would because Liberal and Conservative party supporters often did not give secondary preference to the other's candidate.

Some accounts of the 1952 BC election state that the election was a fizzle for the Liberal/Conservative coalition because those who were behind the adoption of Alternative Voting did not foresee how the CCF's second preferences would go to the Social Credit. A true understanding of Alternative Voting indicates that if the Liberal and Conservative vote was combined and strong enough to form a majority, which is the requirement to be elected under Alternative Voting, then it would not matter what the CCF voters did with their second preferences.

The truth is that the Liberal and Conservative vote collapsed, with the CCF and Social Credit doing unexpectedly well. That is what gave so many seats to CCF and SC. Perhaps under First Past The Post the Liberal and Conservatives would have done even worse. (But usually Alternative Voting produces same result as FPTP would have done.)

The vote collapse can be seen by comparing the 1952 election with the previous one.

In 1949, the Liberal/Conservative coalition received 429,000 votes; CCF 245,000; SC a miniscule 12,000 votes.

In 1952, the Liberals received 180,000 first choice votes; Progressive-Conservative 129,000, a combined total of only 309,000, a full 100,000 fewer votes than in 1949.

Meanwhile the SC vote total rose to 209,000, almost 200,000 more than in 1949.

The CCF vote was mostly unchanged, only slightly depressed to 237,000. The CCF and SC vote combined -- not that it should be combined -- was thus 200,000 more than it had been in 1949.

Due perhaps to a feeling of change in the air, 70,000 more votes were cast in 1952 than in 1949.

If Alternative Voting was brought in to allow the Liberal and Conservative voters to aid each other through vote transfers, as it likely was, the strategy failed when the combined party totals were too small to achieve district majorities anyway.

In only eight seat contests did the combined vote totals of the two parties surpass 50 percent of the votes. They won those eight and only two other seats, Lilloet and North Vancouver. In one of these two, Liberal vote transfers went strongly to the P-C candidate, and in the other, slight SC vote transfers went to the Liberal candidate to give him the seat.

In Lilloet, the vote totals were relatively close between the PC and CCF candidates as the field thinned to only three candidates. The Liberal candidate was the last to be eliminated. About half the votes went to the PC candidate, only half that amount went to the CCF contender.

In North Vancouver, the Liberal candidate was leading from the start, in the first count total. The Liberal had received many of the vote transfers from the PC candidate so had a good lead over his main contender, the CCF candidate. The Social Credit candidate was the last to be eliminated. About half of his votes were transferred to the CCF candidate, only half that amount went to his Liberal contender. But the Liberal candidate had such a lead that he won anyway.

(North Vancouver shows the effect of the increasing number of exhausted votes as the vote-count process deepened. It was not so much that the Liberal vote total increased enough to elect the member as the fact that the quota required to win a seat dropped. On the first count, the simple majority required to win the seat was 11,396. The leading candidate, the Liberal, had 6695 votes. By the sixth (and final) count, the Liberal vote tally had grown to just 10,292, but due to the 4000 of so exhausted votes, the quota had dropped to 9636.

As Canadians used transferable votes (in AV and in STV) in provincial elections prior to 1956 in AB, MB and BC, the quota was not dropped due to decreasing number of ballots still in play (reduced by the number of exhausted votes). But the quota is not what elects members in the last round of the vote count in many cases. Often elections come down to two candidates fighting for the last open seat. With only two candidates, one will get a majority of the votes still in play (and win); and the other won't. But even this does not necessarily assume quota. With the lowest-ranking candidate eliminated in each count (except the counts where surpluses are transferred), in the next count the less-popular of the two would be eliminated anyway, irrespective of quota or majority, and that elimination would leave only one survivor, the winner of the last seat.

In 1952, in most districts where no candidate received a majority on the first count, the Social Credit and CCF parties had enough votes and worked together sufficiently well enough to ensure one or the other took the seat. The popularity of the SC - the number of votes its candidates received - assisted in some cases by transfers from CCF candidates - was what ensured the SC's rise to government.

It was not trickery.

Nor was it a quirk of the Alternative Voting system.

Alternative Voting ensured that an extreme party, such as the Conservatives were seen by most voters at that time in that province, were at a disadvantage compared to the CCF or the Social Credit. The Social Credit, in particular, drew support from a wide range of voters including the small town business communities, the punish-the-government section, the Bible Belt and the radical monetary reformers.

This wide general acceptability was what enabled Social Credit candidates to win the most seats and to form minority government.

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But another factor also helped the Social Credit. They were popular outside the cities. This was not a universal rule, and the SC also had supporters in cities. but the trend was there. And those rural voters were over-represented.

Noticeable in the election results by district is the large range in voter turnout from seat to seat. Several rural districts saw less than 4000 votes cast; while Vancouver seats were elected in contests involving more than 50,000 votes. The IRV election system is not a proportional one, and it is likely that the Social Credit party got more seats than their due share (30 percent of 48 is only 14, while the party took 19 seats) in part due to the unequal voting power between rural and city voters.

The disparity was not huge, but when the SC and CCF parties were so close in voter support and the SC ended up with a larger caucus than the NDP despite having fewer votes, the rural-urban disparity likely made a difference.

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