Electing Alberta governments with less than half the votes was common occurrence in Alberta's history.
No party received a majority of the votes in these elections. But under First Past the Post (FPTP) the leading parties received a majority of the seats in each case. Alberta has never had a minority government, where no party received a majority of the seats.
Calculating these minority government is based on First Choice votes. However when Alberta used a dual system of Single Transferable Voting (a form of pro-rep) in the cities and Alternative Voting in the rural districts, the false majority governments were preferred by a majority of the voters over any other party in the running.
Alberta used the dual STV/AV system from 1924 to 1956, During this time, the leading party had had to have the support of the majority of voters to capture its seats.
During this time, no MLA could be elected outside Edmonton and Calgary without the support of the majority of the voters in the district. They proved themselves the most generally acceptable to the voters, by eventually getting a majority of the votes through vote transfers conducted during the election vote-counting process in order to be elected.
Alberta's false-majority governments
FPTP/Block Voting in Edmonton
1913 Liberal
FPTP (11 automatic re-elections, two MLAs elected overseas)
1917 Liberal
STV/AV
1926 UFA
1930 UFA
1940 Social Credit
1955 SC
(These false majority governments were due to UFA, or the SC, winning more than their proportional share of the single-member AV rural districts. The falseness of the majority is muted by the fact that each MLA in those districts did have the support of the majority of voters in each district.)
FPTP
1967 SC
1971 P-C
1989 P-C
1993 P-C
2004 P-C
2012 P-C
2015 NDP
Note: The 1921 election is sometimes described as a false-majority government - the Liberals did receive more votes than the UFA. But it is not listed here because the block voting system used in Edmonton and Calgary gave more votes to each city voter than it gave to rural residents and the UFA mostly did not run in the Block Voting city districts. So the true amount of parties' support has never been calculated and never can be without consultation with the old ballots.
In 1913, the same parties ran in both FPTP districts and Block Voting city districts so the ability of some to cast more votes than others did not affect proportions.
(source: Dennis Pilon research 2019)
housekeeping: keywords Alberta elections Proportional Representation
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