Concerning my analyses of the 2021 federal election based on Effective Votes (below), The point of this exercise was not to determine how many votes were wasted but to look at the Effective Votes (the ones that actually went to the successful candidates), and to see where the dis-proportionality came in. Yes, in STV because it is quota based, surplus votes are moved from elected candidates so that excess votes can go where they would be more useful (even if not used to elect the first preference). I don't consider that in this analysis. This is defensible for these reasons: 1. Electoral reformers usually find comfort in ensuring that as many as possible of votes cast are used to elect someone even if the successful candidates receive excess votes. (Massive majorities in local districts (under FPTP) do show large popularity for the candidate elected, but can lead to dis-proportionality when you look at overall proportionality of a party's representation.)
My "Effective Votes"analysis takes the local character of the FPTP system and uses it to define Effective Votes (with all others ignored) then sees what the story is.
Oddly we find that without any true science FPTP in 2021 did create a sort of quota - for each about 20,000 Effective Votes, a party received a seat. Due to how votes were cast in the election, this created a mixed representation overall.
Say Party A received 40,000 effective votes and secures one win for party A in one district and another win for Party A in another district. This seems fair mathematically when compared to Party B that secured 20,000 Effective Votes and did secure a seat in a third district.
But it could happen that in each of those three district the majority of voters are ignored. In fact it is very possible that in two of the district the majority in each will be ignored. (In the 2021 election in two-thirds of the ridings the majority of votes cast were ignored.) Parties C and D and E etc. have no representation at all. Also the one member of Party B is looked to for representation of Party B supporters in all three districts. And the two Party A members are looked to for representation of Party A supporters in the district won by Party B. But the members have no direct tie to out-of-district votes. Out-of-district voters cannot vote for the member when he or she is up for re-election and he or she cannot draw on their votes to ensure his or her re-election. In fact the members might know or care little about out-of-district concerns. The one Party B member, aside form being busy enough with his own district's concerns, might find that the out-of-district Party B supporters have interests opposed to the interests of people within his own district, whom he is by custom and tradition supposed to represent.
And he must remember that those people in the district are the ones who can influence whether or not he or she is re-elected, not the voters outside the district. In summary, it is difficult or impossible for one person to represent all the people in a district. Each member is elected by just one group within the district (usually a minority of the votes) and all other votes are ignored when seats are filled. And we have seen - how most of the voters in most of the ridings are un-represented directly by their member. - most can find little representation from members outside the district. Multi-member districts would address these issues of poor representation. "Grouped constituencies" is the old name for these multi-member districts. Simply take several of the existing districts and lump them together, retaining the same number of members but now elected in one district. With each voter casting just one vote, mixed and thus fair representation would result. 2. Another reason not to be concerned about non-transfer of excess votes, is that even in STV, sometimes surplus votes are not transferred. The surplus of those elected in the last count are not transferred, and those elected after this count due to the number of remaining candidates being equal to or just one more than the number of remaining open seats also do not have their surplus, if any, transferred.
Still whether the votes are surplus to quota or in excess of one more than the nearest contender, if the successful candidates receive a high majority of the votes cast, it is a successful election. And that is what happens in all STV elections.
If the Liberals had been elected to a majority government in 2021 with a majority of the votes, electoral reformers would not have complained. This is looking at overall figures.
Looking locally, excess votes in the various districts can have dis-proportional effect.
Excess votes cast for Conservatives in Alberta and not being able to be used to secure seats outside the province meant that the Conservative did not get its share of the seats its overall votes would have given it.
But - Conservatives did take more Alberta seats than their share of the Alberta votes. so excess votes in some districts did not do them any harm within Alberta.
Under any PR system we use in Canada, provincial borders will prevent movement of votes. An excess of votes in one province will not effect filling of seats outside that province. This likely will hold true for regions within provinces as well. The great number of urban votes will not be used to flood the nearby rural districts where voters are sparse. (But the disparity between urban and rural districts is oft over-exaggerated, or is not anyway an infallible rule.
There can be seen variation of three to one, that is 30,000 voters elect an MP in a urban district and 10,000 in a rural district. But this is actually only slight discretion compared to the vast degree of variation of density of people per sq. km. in rural versus urban ridings.
(In compensation for the variation in density of voters, the ratio of geographic size, district to district, is something like a factor of thousand (10 sq kms for a urban riding, and ten thousand sq. kms (or more) for a rural riding, while the variation in number of eligible voters riding to riding is a ratio of a scant two (or three) to one in most cases.
And note that the urban-rural disparity is not always the case -- the semi-rural Battle River riding has more voters than most districts in Toronto. Under any PR system brought in in Canada, each province or region within a province would be given separate seats. Rural voters outside the major cities would be protected from being submerged from the potential flood of urban voters. (This is critical both for fairness and to subvert the anti-PR propaganda that such a possibility would give an opportunity for.) The million voters in Toronto have more seats than the whole province of Saskatchewan. With (generally) equal representation on a voter-per-seat basis, there is nothing we can do about that. But any PR system must ensure that Saskatchewan has its own members. As Colin Walmsley pointed out in a recent article
(Colin Walmsley's article on polarization: https://www.fairvote.ca/2021/09/28/blame-first-past-the-post-for-canadas-growing-rural-urban-divide/),
members do mostly represent their own constituents.
Urban members represent urban voters (or a portion of the voters within the urban district anyway).
Rural members represent rural voters (or a portion of the voters within that rural district anyway). A struggling farmer in Acme, Alberta is likely just as un-represented by a member in an Edmonton seat as he would be by a member in a Toronto seat. The urban-rural split is not just Toronto to the hinterland but between each city and its rural counterparts within the same province. It exists within Alberta for example. In fact Alberta is one of the more urbanized provinces in Canada if we look at where its population lives. That could account for its having ten percent of the seats while it has 14 percent of Canada population. (The super-large size of semi-rural Battle River riding eludes any easy explanation.) In provincial elections, despite growth in Alberta population, Alberta has fewer districts outside the major cities than it had 70 years ago, despite claims of continuing disparity in favour of rural voters. Edmonton / Calgary "the rest of the province" 1959 16 seats 49 districts 2019 46 seats 41 districts
"The rest of the province" is only slightly smaller in geographic size than it was in 1959. (Edmonton and Calgary even now after decades of urban sprawl cover no more than 1500 sq. kms., an insignificant amount of space when Alberta's area is 660,000 sq. kms.)
And "the rest of the province" has more people than ever but fewer seats than in 1959. Currently it has about 2.1M residents, 48 percent of the population, while it has only 47 percent of the provincial seats. This is verified if we look at sampling of districts' votes in the 2019 provincial election: Edmonton Strathcona 20,000 votes were cast Peace River 14,000 votes were cast Vermilion-Lloydminster-Wainwright 25,000 votes were cast. so no special rural (or urban) compensation is seen. When it comes to provincial government representation, there is no rural-urban disparity of voters per seat, at least not one in favour of rural voters. The super-populous Battle River federal riding also is an exception to any rule of special compensation given to rural voters in federal elections.
The immensity of specific districts would be averaged out when multi-member "grouped constituencies" are created, thus creating a degree of fairness by that alone. Because each province holds a variety of different voters, each province needs mixed representation so members of more than one party represent it directly. And for the same reason each region, rural or urban, needs mixed representation, as much as votes cast will allow fairly.
Votes being unable to transfer across region or provincial borders may create some waste through non-transferred surpluses but the waste would be small compared to the majority of votes that are currently being ignored in most of the districts. Multi-member representation ensures that the largest proportion of votes are represented and not ignored. That as many as possible of the votes cast are Effective Votes. And Effective Votes are what the analysis below is about.
================================== 2021 Canadian election of the 17M votes cast in the election, only 8,151,212 were used to elect anyone. The rest were ignored when it came to filling the seats. What if we ignore the ineffective votes and analyze the election just by looking at the "effective votes"? We find these results: The parties' effective votes, province by province Liberal Conservative NDP Green BQ NF 90,000 15,000 0 0 0 NS 161,000 60,000 0 0 0 PEI 39,000 0 0 0 0 NB 128,000 72,000 0 0 0 Quebec 808,000 281,000 0 0 793,000 Ontario 1.9M 1M 92,000 18,000 0 MN 81,000 158,000 43,000 0 0 SK 0 305,000 0 0 0 AB 37,000 1M 49,000 0 0 BC 299,000 345,000 311,000 25,000 0 NUN 0 0 3000 0 0 NWT 5000 0 0 0 0 Yukon 6000 0 0 0 0 TOTALS 3,510,000 3,304,000 526,000 43,000 793,000 SEATS 159 119 25 2 33 Eff. votes per seat 19,000 23,000 22,000 21,000 26,000 We see here that the Liberal party received more effective votes than the Conservatives although in votes cast Conservatives received more. This is due to Liberals winning more seats. Due to the succession of Liberal victories, based on local dominance, fewer of their votes were ignored. Why did the large number of Conservative votes not result in more victories? because a large portion of the Conservative vote was concentrated in just one province, a sparely-populated province with only about ten percent of the Canada's seats. We do see fair consistency party to party. Each party took about a seat for each 20,000-odd votes it had. Liberals who won largely in cities did not suffer from the large number of voters in the urban districts. Nor did the Conservatives benefit from the relatively few number of voters in the the rural districts where they were strongest. (So the rural-urban disparity does not appear to be powerful in and of itself.) This holds true for each province across the country except PEI where 40,000 votes were enough for Liberals to take four seats. The votes counts in Alberta are worthy of special attention. About 1M Conservative votes were cast in Alberta where just ten percent of Canada's seats are. These votes were about 1/5th of the party's total across the country. The Conservative party received one Alberta seat for each 33,000 votes. This it seems is what denied the Conservative party its lead in seats over the Liberal party that its lead in votes should have given it. Looking at it province by province, we see that Conservative took a seat for each 34,000 votes in Alberta, far above the average. (This was due to large majorities of some of the Conservative winners.) The parties' percentage of effective votes is very similar to their seat counts. The Liberal are over-represented and the Conservatives are under-represented. (Alberta explains that.) percent of effective votes seats percent. of seats Liberal 43 159 47 Conservative 40 119 36 NDP 6.4 25 7 Green .5 2 1 BQ 10 9 100 338 100 Aside from the Alberta/Conservative discrepancy, the parties' tallies of seats are very proportional to the parties' Effective Votes. So it seems by and large that the problem is not with unfair distribution of seats or gerrymandering, but with the election system itself. Each party's effective votes varied considerably from the votes cast for the party. For example, while the NDP took 7 percent of the effective votes and 7 percent of the seats, it took 18 percent of the votes cast. Thus we need to ensure that more of the votes cast count - that they are used effectively, that they elect someone. This can be done by using all votes cast to calculate top-up members in MMP. Or adopting multi-member districts. Now all votes cast for candidates other than the single winner in each district are ignored. That is the main shortcoming of our election system today.
Thanks for reading.
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