Many in Millwoods must be disappointed by the overall results of the recent Alberta election. In the Edmonton-Millwoods provincial district, more than 60 percent voted to re-elect the local sitting NDP MLA Christina Gray. However overall, the United Conservatives (UCP) won a majority government.
The UCP did receive a majority of the votes cast across the province. But most everything else about the election reeked of unfairness and undemocratic representation.
The actual voter turn-out was pretty dismal, and it seems that many voters voted for parties that were not their first choice in order to try to get their vote to count. And despite this, many votes were ignored and were not used to elect anyone.
This seems harsh criticism, but the election method that we used did actually produce such dysfunction. With just one MLA elected in each district and votes being only used in that one district, there is no overall proportionality or fairness. The idea that one MLA can represent the range of sentiment in the district just does not compute, and yet that is the polite fiction that we believe in when we elect an MLA that will “represent” us, even if we did not vote for him or her.
Other countries do not use the single-winner system to elect their legislators, and in their elections the votes cast are used more coherently to determine the elected members.
Overall the recent Alberta election did produce a Legislature where the United Conservatives and the New Democrats did get the approximate correct proportions in the chamber as compared to votes cast. But that was a sheer accident. The NDP made a clean one-party sweep of Edmonton's 20 seats, but received only two-thirds of the city’s votes. The UCP got all but four seats outside Edmonton and Calgary but received only about two-thirds of the votes cast in those parts.
Those two dis-proportional results actually balanced each other as far as overall party representation goes. But now we see UCP MLAs from farm country trying to be the voice of big-city conservatives living in Edmonton.
In Calgary each party took about half the votes and about half the seats. This fair sharing of the seats was just by chance - with a shift of just three hundred votes, the NDP might have lost four of its Calgary seats and the city result would not have been so fair. The small shift in votes would have meant that the new Legislature would be made up of a very lopsided 53-seat UCP caucus facing only 34 NDP members.
And the opposite holds true as well. The NDP with just a bit more luck could have been elected to majority government. With a different shift of less than 2500 votes, the NDP might have won six more seats overall, which would have produced a NDP-majority legislature. (These close districts where UCP won with just a small lead over the NDP candidate were Calgary North, Northwest, Bow, Cross and East; and Lethbridge East.)
This very different result would have been produced by a shift of less than 2500 votes of the 1.8M votes cast in this election.
Or it could have been produced if just 2500, of the one million eligible voters who did not vote, got out the door and voted NDP. (It would have to be a very specific 2500 voters to have this result, but the possibility still exists.)
Yes, in the 2023 election, one of the most significant elections in our provincial history, more than a million of Alberta’s eligible voters did not vote. Voter turn-out was actually lower this time than in 2019 – 100,000 fewer voters voted this year compared to 2019.
Meantime the two main parties combined took more votes than they had in 2019, while fewer votes were cast. Voter turn-out was significantly lower in this election than in 2019. Even though there were more eligible voters, fewer votes were cast this year compared to 2019. I believe this drop came from voters who had voted for third parties (parties other than UCP and NDP) in 2019. Unable to see any chance for their preferred candidate to win, many of them simply stayed home. Those parties received just 74,000 votes as opposed to the 240,000 they had received in 2019.
And even many voters for the two main parties likely stayed home as well. The media identified Edmonton as safe seats for the NDP and the rural districts as safe seats for the UCP, so likely some stayed home feeling their preference just did not have a chance. It takes a stalwart voter to get out to vote, knowing their vote will likely be ignored.
Somewhat surprisingly, there are many such voters – a third of Edmonton voters went against the NDP tide, and a third of rural voters went against the UCP tide. In four rural districts NDP voters actually prevailed against expectations.
And there is no way to know how many voters felt forced to vote for candidates not of their first choice. No time ever in our history has the “third parties” received such a low percentage of the votes cast. Only about three percent of the votes were cast for parties other than the UCP and NDP.
Heck, even in Alberta’s first election, back when we were just coming into provincehood, five percent of the votes were cast for other than the two main parties. Generally a good 20 percent of votes cast are for parties other than the most-popular ones. It is not likely that that usual 20 percent of voters just of their own free will decided that the NDP or the UCP was the answer to their dreams.
Should politics work that way?
Should voters feel that voting for whom they truly want to see elected is a waste of time?
Should a third of the votes cast in our capital city go for naught?
Should more than a third of the voters outside Edmonton and Calgary be almost totally un-represented?
If you are like me, you answered “no” to each of these questions.
And we can look at most of the countries around the world and see a better way to elect our representatives - Proportional Representation. This can take the form of party list PR where voters vote for parties.
Or it can be Single Transferable Voting where voters vote directly for candidates. With most successful candidates getting the same number of votes, and each party getting a seat for each 20,000 votes cast or so, each party gets its fair share of the seats. STV offers the benefit that votes cast in Edmonton are used to elect Edmonton MLAs, which may not be the case in list PR.
As well, the system known as Mixed Member Proportional secures local representation and also party proportionality.
No matter the system chosen, PR will dependably produce fair results. This is not done by the system used in our last election, where less than one percent of votes cast determined whether we would now be living under a UCP or a NDP majority government.
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(originally published in Millwoods Mosaic June 2023)
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More on the 2023 Alberta election
under FPTP there are many wasted votes and members are not elected with very different number of votes so FPTP fails on both measures.
party proportional representation can be produced under FPTP
Just look at Alberta today where NDP's under-representation in the rural area is balanced against Conservative total non-representation in the capital city.
each is a dis-proportional result but altogether if we look at votes cast, the parties' rep in the Legislature is very party proportional
but those sort of fair overall results cannot be depended on under FPTP, where many votes are wasted
and it could happen next time, just as likely, that the waste will not be balanced Conservative to NDP,
but instead next time one or the other might be only one to suffer the usual vote waste.
NDP with 44 percent of vote took 38 seats (44 percent of seats)
United Conservatives with 53 percent of the vote took 49 seats (56 percent of the seats)
But note these statistics:
With a shift of 300 votes, the Conservatives might have taken four seats from NDP, which would have produced a very lopsided 53-seat UCP caucus facing only 34 NDP members
With a shift of less than 2500 votes, the NDP might have taken six seats from Conservatives, which would have produced a NDP-majority legislature of 44 NDP seats to 43 UCP seats.
less than one percent of votes cast determined whether a UCP or a NDP majority government was elected in the 2023 election.
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so high rate of effective votes is best way to dependably ensure proportional results.
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but under FPTP in 2023 Alberta election we see:
looking at winners' tallies (not the lead they won by but votes received)
those who won
with more than 16,000 votes 6 UCP, 1 NDP
between 15,000 and 16,000 6 UCP 2 NDP
between 14,000 and 15,000 7 UCP 2 NDP
between 13,000 and 14,000 13 UCP 5 NDP
between 12,000 and 13,000 2 UCP 8 NDP
between 11,000 and 12,000 4 UCP 8 NDP
between 10,000 and 11,000 4 UCP 2 NDP
between 8,000 and 10000 3 UCP 5 NDP
less than 8000 votes 6 UCP 2 NDP
totals 51 UCP 35 NDP
totals should be 49 and 34 (so not exact - must have made a mistake some place)
we see that some won with more than twice the votes that elected others.
glory and shame approx. equally shared by both parties
so no obvious benefit of FPTP's unfairness to any one party this time
but perhaps next time one or other party might use up big counts to win few seats while other party might take many seats with just a few votes - -- it could happen.
such un-balance might benefit NDP or UCP -- there is no way to know which,
either way it will be unfair and either way hundreds of thousands of votes will be wasted.
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