After all the excitement and thrill of marking a vote in the recent demonstration of democratic accountability, it was a real let-down to simply see my ballot be pushed into a ballot-counting machine and being given the difficult job of finding satisfaction in trusting the machine to read my ballot correctly and then to report it correctly.
I am not saying it is not doing it - but it cannot be proven either way - it seems to be all a matter of trust in technology and a corporation who owns the machines.
That is asking a lot of me.
And there is no scrutineering -- the machine could do anything and we would not know if it is correct or wrong.
A friend even tells me that the by-law concerning the ballot-counting machines actually forbids any comparison with the actual paper ballots.
If city elections show much lower turn-out than provincial or federal elections - and they do, it could well be due to the use of these machines, which are not used in elections at either of those two levels.
We take the machines and the fact that almost half or more of our new city council will be elected with just support a minority of votes in the ward, and if this election is like the last one, more votes will be ignored than used to fill the aldermanic seats -- and we have a real lack of democratic accountability and transparency.
City elections did not use to be like this.
There was a time when city votes were hand-counted.
There was even a time when Edmonton used STV, a district-level form of Proportional representation. Sure it was about a hundred years ago, but it proved itself back then to produce varied and fair representation.
As well there was a time when Edmonton had fewer districts than city councillors.
When Edmonton used STV, all the councillors were elected in one city-wide district. That allowed groups thinly-spread across the city to get fair representation. Any group that had 17 percent of city voters across the city could elect a member.
(Some might think that is too loose -- too giving of seats to a small minority but under the FPTP system that we have now, as few as 4034 votes were enough to elect Anne Stevenson in the O'day min ward. That is just 4000 votes out of the 235,000 votes cast in this election overall.
While in other wards, as much as 5800 votes were not enough to be elected, in the Ipiihkoohkanipiaohtsi ward. So no fairness there.)
And as recently as 2007, Edmonton had multi-member wards, electing two to each ward.
And as recently as 1977, Edmonton had only four wards, each electing three councillors.
Unfortunately the result was not much more fair than today's single-winner elections - because each voter had up to three votes so the largest group could take all three seats even if it had only a minority of the vote.
Two and three councillors per ward are not very many, but they were used so we could do it again. And hopefully, when we do, we will give each voter just one vote. Together multi-member wards and single voting would provide more fair and balanced representation than the present single-winner wards. and single voting.
Currently there is the possibility that a large group of voters spread across the city could take all the seats - as long as it had the most votes in every ward.
With some councillors being elected with merely 29 percent of votes cast in a ward, a group that has plurality (not even majority of the votes) in seven wards would have dominance in the city hall. This could take as few as 35,000 votes. That few number of voters could take control of city hall and rule over a city of almost 1 Million residents!
Bring back hand-counting for city votes!
Bring back Proportional representation!
Bring back multi-seat wards and give each voter just one vote - that would give us PR!
Thanks for reading.
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May 2024:
The UCP government has passed a law forbidding the use of vote counting machines in city elections. Good for them.
I trust people to count my vote!
What city elections really need is proportional representation,
I like STV but list PR is fine too.
multi-member districts and each voter having just a single vote.
STV would see use of transferable votes and that is good,
but list PR in multi-member districts would also do a better job than what we have now.
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