It is said that Calgary is the only real battleground in the upcoming Alberta election,
but actually the NDP does not need very many Calgary seats - if it does as well as expected in Edmonton, and in the rural districts, it does only as well as it did in the 2015 election.
2015
Due to the non-proportional representation First Past the Post election system that is used in Alberta, in 2015 the NDP swept the Edmonton seats, won a majority of the seats in Calgary and just less than half of seats in rural Alberta. NDP MLAs were elected in all 21 Edmonton districts, 15 of the 26 Calgary districts and 18 of the 40 districts outside the major cities.
2019
Due to the non-proportional representation First Past the Post election system that is used in Alberta, in 2019 the NDP swept all but one of the Edmonton seats, while the UCP swept almost all the seats in Calgary and 39 of the 41 seats in rural Alberta.
NDP MLAs were elected in 20 of the 21 Edmonton districts, 3 of the 26 Calgary districts and 2 of the 41 districts outside the major cities, the latter including suburban St. Albert.
If NDP get the same number of seats in Edmonton as it has in last two elections and gets the same number of seats in the rural districts as it did in 2015, it would take 39 or so seats in those two areas.
So that means to get a majority in the Legislature, for which only about 44 seats are required, it only needs five more seats in Calgary.
Proportional representation would of course mean that to get a majority, a party would have to take a majority of the votes,
but for now as Alberta does not use that fair system. Winning 44 seats, with however many votes that such an achievement requires, is all that is required.
In the last election the UCP took 54 percent of the vote, the NDP took 33 percent, so based on that, getting a majority is easier for the UCP than the NDP.
But the NDP just needs to take first place in 44 districts to have majority in the Legislature.
The UCP won some of its seats with as few as 7500 votes,
the NDP took 600,000 votes so that is actually almost enough to win 80 seats (at 7500 per seat).
Of course with that ratio across the board, the UCP with 1M votes had enough votes to win 120 seats.
So really this election just comes to the 87 sub-battles across the province, with anything from a UCP majority to a NDP majority government possible in the overall outcome when those 87 winners meet in the Legislature for the first time.
If we believe in science, we sure don't apply it to our elections!
if we had proportional representation, each party would get its fair share of seats, no more and no less.
Safe seats would not be ignored, and "battle" districts would not be emphasized.
Each vote would be important, but each votes would be only as important as the next one in the 1.6M votes that are cast.
Under PR, a small shift in votes would yield in a small shift in seats,
not a catastrophic defeat or euphoric advance as happens under FPTP,
or no change at all as sometimes happens under FPTP,
or a change in the seat count in the opposite direction to the change in votes cast, as sometimes also happens under FPTP.
Ah PR would be great!
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Follow-up:
NDP could have won majority government with just five Calgary seats if it had gotten some lucky breaks.
But it did not -
it actually took 14 Calgary seats but suffered almost total shut-out outside Edmonton and Calgary,
so even though the NDP did exceptionally well in Edmonton, taking 100 percent of the seats with only 62 percent of the vote, it did not take majority government, or government at all.
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But next time, if only 100,000 voters shift to NDP
or 100,000 voters who vote Conservative in 2023 do not vote at all,
or if just a fraction of the 500,000 registered voters who did not vote in 2023 vote for the NDP next time,
then
the NDP should have more votes than the Conservatives and be in line for the usual windfall of seats that goes to the most-popular party...
fingers crossed.
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