Canada once used a variety of election systems, not just the single-winner First Past The Post that now is the rule in federal and provincial elections across the country.
The obvious sign of this is the use of multiple-member districts in federal elections (prior to 1968) and the use of MM districts in provincial elections in every province at one time or another. In Quebec they were used prior to 1867; in every other province MM districts were used at some point between 1867 and 1996 - in some cases even before 1867 as well. Every province used multi-member districts at one time or another, to elect all or only some of their members.
Most of the MM districts used Block Voting, where often - but not always - one party took all the district seats. The last time Block Voting was used in Canada in a provincial election was in 1986 in BC, when 34 -- about half the province's MLAs -- were elected in two-member districts. One district did elect mixed representation in this election.
PEI used multi-member districts for about a decade after its last use in BC, but there each seat was filled through a separate first past the post election contest.
The last time a non-plurality system (a PR system) was used at the provincial level took place in multi-member districts. This was in 1955 in Alberta when PR-STV was used to elect Edmonton and Calgary MLAs in 6- and 7-seat districts.
The balancing of opposite one-party sweeps in various districts that often happens under First Past The Post means that parties may be represented equally or as per their vote tallies, but it means that supporters of the lesser party in each different region are unrepresented.
In every year from 1792 (or earlier) to 1838 and 1841 to 1867, there were always at least some government representatives elected in MM districts serving in the colonial legislative assembly of Upper Canada or Lower Canada or the United provinces (Quebec and Ontario).
From 1867 to 1990, there were always at least some government representatives in one or more provinces elected in MM districts.
From 1867 to 1968, there were always MPs elected in MM districts.
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The use of MM in dates and names
Eleven ridings elected multiple MPs at one time or another, between 1867 and 1968. These were Ottawa, West Toronto, Hamilton, Halifax (NS), Cape Breton (NS), Pictou (NS), St. John City and County (NB), Victoria and three in PEI: King's County, Queen's County and Prince County.
Each of the provinces and territories (except Nunavut) once used multiple-member districts.
They switched to electing all their members in single-member districts elected through First Past The Post in these years:
Quebec 1867
Ontario 1893
North-West Territories 1894 (see the 1891 NWT election)
Yukon 1903
Manitoba 1954
Alberta 1956
New Brunswick 1967
Saskatchewan 1967
Newfoundland and Labrador 1975
Nova Scotia 1978
BC 1990
PEI 1996
(PEI's elections were special cases as each district elected two members, and voters who owned property in the district voted for the Councilman while voters resident in the district joined with the property-owners to vote for the Assemblyman. Later the exact same voters were allowed to vote for each of the two members in a district but still each seat was filled in separate contest.)
The systems used included Block Voting, Single Transferable Voting (STV), Limited Voting and a system where each seat was filled through a separate contest.
Now federal elections -- and all provincial and territorial elections -- use only single-member districts, a situation that came about through electoral reform.
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What is purpose of multi-member districts?
Multi-member districts under STV or district-level party-list PR, and
pooling of overall votes as under MMP (as in New Zealand) or party-list PR,
or both district PR and overall PR, as under Denmark's MMP/district PR,
means that a large proportion of the voters have actual representation that they voted for.
Multi-member districts means:
less fragmenting of the electorate (because there are fewer districts) so less opportunity to gerrymander
and allows the
use of natural pre-existing boundaries for the districts
such as city corporate limits or counties or provincial borders,
with the varying sizes of such natural districts being compensated for by varying number of members.
As long as each district has multiple members and each voter cast just one vote, balanced mixed representation is almost always produced --and always produced if seat count is more than three, if we look at past use of MM districts in Canada
or if voters may cast multiple votes, one party may not take all the seats in the district if voters have liberty to lump their multiple votes on one candidate (but mixed representation is less guaranteed than if single voting is the rule.)
As well, party-proportionality of results is more guaranteed if voters can mark back-up preferences, as in ranked voting (in MM districts of course - meaning STV).
Increased proportionality of representation in each district means
less incentive to gerrymander.
If party A gets all its due seats in district North and also in district South, why bother to shift the border southward or northward?
And the same holds true for Party B.
PR as can happen in multi-member districts means fairness to all, small and large parties and of all stripes.
Each party will get what the voters decide is its due.
Very fair...
Here's an essay on the use of MM districts in Canada, 1867-1990s, with the use of MM districts in the U.S. and U.K. also being briefly discussed.
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Canada’s Past Use of Multi-Member Districts
Tom Monto, Edmonton January 2022
Recently I came across the 1976 thesis, Challenges to the Voting System in Canada 1874-1974, by Charles Harry John Phillips.* It inspired me to conduct a self-led research project on the use of multi-member districts in Canada’s past.
Phillips noted that challenges to the federal FPTP voting were more numerous than might be thought and in passing he mentions an old debate on the use of multi-member districts instead of the single-member districts that now are the rule in provincial and federal elections in Canada.
Multi-member districts (MMDs) are electoral districts that send two or more members to a legislative chamber. Although not used for election of legislators today in the U.S. or Canada, they were more common in both U.S. and Canadian political history than may be thought.
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*Charles Harry John Phillips,
Challenges to the Voting System in Canada 1874-1974
University of Western Ontario, Ph.D. thesis, 1976
(available on-line https://ir.lib.uwo.ca/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1860&context=digitizedtheses)
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Phillips noted that among the many challenges to the federal FPTP voting in Canada in the past, very often new voting schemes included plans for multi-member districts. Phillips cautioned the reader that his thesis did not address the single-seat districts versus multi-seat districts question in any depth. This hole I seek to fill, at least to some degree, below, after a short discussion of the forms of challenge that Richards did discuss and the use of MM districts in the U.S.
Phillips in his thesis says early reform concerned questions of
- secret versus open voting (secret voting was settled as the best way to go) (secret voting first pursued as early as 1831 (p. 7);
- long elections where the vote in a district could take days or where elections in districts were held separately each in turn (to allow time for remedial and corrupt practices to be brought to bear)
- compulsory versus optional voting (should voters be forced to vote?) (Canada decided to keep voting voluntary. (In Australia, voting is compulsory - with negligent voters receiving something like parking ticket in some cases.)
- the method of aggregating votes to ascertain the successful candidates (the only topic of discussion in the electoral reform debate today). (plurality, majoritarian or quota-based?) (p. 4).
The use of the contingent vote (also known as ranked or preferential voting), the Ware formula, Bucklin vote, STV and Alternative Voting (IRV) began to emerge in the late 19th Century. As well, Limited Voting and Cumulative Voting also were discussed and sometimes brought into use in late 1800s/early 1900s. (Challenges to the Voting System in Canada, p. 14-15)
Of the systems listed, only STV is proportional. It is not party-list PR because it is candidate-based. It is considered Proportional because it elects members in a district roughly in due proportion to party vote share, at least as long as perhaps 10 to 20 percent of district voters vote for that candidate.) (p. 20)
Limited Voting worked like STV in that it produced both majority and minority representation; Cumulative Voting also did so as well but only if minorty goup voted carefully. Neither use transferable votes so more votes are wasted under those systems than under STV.
The other systems listed such as IRV are majoritarian, ensuring that the elected member is elected with the support of a majority of voters, with no attempt at proportionality. Formulas for counting of the vote vary [in part based on whether you think first choice is held much more highly than back-up preferences or if you think they ought to be valued about the same].
Gove system
Another early alternative to FPTP, not mentioned in Phillips’ list, is the Gove system, now known as Indirect STV. Voters cast single votes in multi-member district. Voters do not mark their ballots with rankings, but votes are transferred, as needed, based on the candidate’s pre-set instructions. A handy system to produce many of the benefits of STV in districts where it is difficult to collect all the ballots in one central place to conduct STV transfers or where X voting is preferred over ranked voting.
(See https://www.cs.jhu.edu/~jason/papers/eisner.istv91.pdf (un-dated [1990?]) for discussion of its potential use in South Africa.)
(Wikipedia “Single Transferable Voting” has a paragraph on the Gove system.)
Phillips presents highlights of the 1910 Report of the Royal Commission Appointed to Enquire into Electoral Systems (U.K. government), which investigated the alternative systems mentioned. By 1910, Alternative Voting had been put into use in Queensland (1892) and Western Australia (1907) and in some U.S. cities. STV had been used in Tasmanian cities and state elections (1896/1907) and perhaps in city elections in Johannesburg, South Africa.
Use of those systems came slightly later to Canada. Municipal-level AV was first used in Canada in Lethbridge in 1913 and municipal STV in Calgary in 1917. STV at the provincial level was first used in Canada in Winnipeg in 1920.
Urban STV/rural IRV, where all members in Alberta were elected either in STV or IRV, was first used in Alberta in 1926.
Phillips says the 1926 Alberta election “was the first election in Canada where every member in the chamber was elected through non-plurality systems.” But it should be noted that that does not mean that single-member FPTP was the only electoral system used before 1926.
Previously, there had even been occasions where no member of a specific provincial legislature was elected through single-member FPTP. (And in fact STV may actually be considered a plurality system - each popular candidate is elected (if popular enough to have quota) and no less popular candidate is ever elected in place of someone more popular.)
Every Nova Scotia and New Brunswick provincial election from entry into Canada to the 1970s was held with members being elected in MM districts as well as single-member districts, or only in MM districts. (First election held in Nova Scotia - in Halifax in 1758 - used a MM district.)
Every BC provincial election from 1871 to 1990 also used a combination of MM districts and single-member districts.
The district contests electing multiple members were pure plurality contests - there was no quota or majority required to be elected. They were conducted using Block Voting, where each voter cast multiple votes (up to as many as the number of empty seats). The leading party often made a clean sweep of the district’s seats without a majority of the votes being required. But they had not been single-member FPTP contests.
Philips wrote that it is recognized that in Canada the voting system functions in conjunction with territorial constituencies varying greatly in geographic area and population, frequently justified by reference to a flexibly defined "sense of community". (p. 5) [This flexibility is such that widely-varying-sized single-member districts (federal ridings, provincial constituencies, city wards in some cases) all claim credit for producing "local representation.”]
Some voting schemes proposed would have geographical districts replaced by groups based on functional or occupational composition (such as workers and farmers). [Phillips said he would discuss these only when the new scheme was pursued seriously.] (p. 5)
He presents much on the early work of Canadian MP Richard Cartwright and the farmer-oriented Patrons of Industry, which laid the base for the advances that electoral reformers experienced during the "Progressive" period" of the inter-war years.
Phillips says early PR was seen by some as a way to get main parties to veer to address farmer and worker concerns; others saw it as a means for farmers and workers themselves to get their own candidates elected ("third" parties; direct representation in the House of Commons).
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Multi-Member Districts
A footnote in Philips’ thesis (p. 5) led me to this thesis:
Ruth C. Silva, "Compared Values of Single- and Multi-Member Legislative District", Western Political Quarterly, 1964
Ruth C. Silva, in “Compared Values of the Single- and the Multi-member Legislative Districts,” noted that multi-seat districts were used in the U.S. more than is generally recognized and that the effect of the MM districts depended on which voting system was used. (p. 5)
Much of my discussion below is centred on discussion of the variety of voting systems used in the different Canadian provinces during their use of MM districts.
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Canada
MM districts were used in Canada more than is commonly known.
Multi-member federal riding(s) were used in every federal election prior to 1965, starting with the Confederation election of 1867.
The last provincial multi-member electoral district was used in 1996. Prior to that, every province had used multi-seat districts at one time or another.
In 1952 every province except Ontario and Quebec was using at least one multi-member district, with New Brunswick and PEI electing all their MLAs in multi-member districts at that time. PEI elected all its members in multi-member districts for its entire history until 1996.
Little known is the use of MM districts in the Prairie Provinces. But each of those three western provinces used one or more MM districts for decades.
BC also used a mixture of MM and single-member districts for its entire history prior to 1990. That province's use of Alternative Voting is well known while Alberta and Manitoba's use of PR-STV (in five districts) is often overlooked. And the same happens with MM districts. Many overlook that New Brunswick and PEI (and the other two Atlantic provinces to a lesser degree) have a long and deep history of using MM districts.
The use of MMs dates back to the pre-Confederation period, even to the time when British North America included present-day U.S. and MM districts were even a feature of elections in the Old Country in the past.
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Old England
Multi-member districts were used at the start of parliamentary democracy in old England. In 1265, Simon de Montfort convened a Parliament that contained two knights from each shire (county), and two burgesses from each borough (city) — one of the earliest examples of representative parliaments in the world. Single-winner First Past The Post did not come into use until later.
And British elections used MM districts in more recent years as well.
For instance, they used Limited Voting to some degree, co-incidentally starting at the time of Canada's Confederation. The Limited Voting system "was applied in England to constituencies returning more than two members from 1867 to 1885…. the LV was applied to 13 constituencies each returning three or four members and included Glasgow, Birmingham and the City of London." (Phillips, Challenges to the Voting System, 1867-1974 (p. 17)
As well, STV was used to elect some members of the House of Commons in MM districts for many years. In 1918 STV was adopted for the university constituencies of Cambridge, Oxford, and others. These constituencies used STV until their abolition in 1950 (or 1922 in the case of Dublin University).
"Multi-member constituencies existed in the Parliament of the United Kingdom and its predecessor bodies in the component parts of the United Kingdom from the earliest era of elected representation until they were abolished by the Representation of the People Act 1948. "
(From
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multi-member_constituencies_in_the_Parliament_of_the_United_Kingdom)
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Multi-member districts in the U.S.A.
Currently today, ten U.S. states have at least one legislative chamber that includes members elected in multi-member districts.
The reason why national House elections stopped using MMDs is explained in a footnote below.
There are two types of MMDs:
-those that cover the entire jurisdiction (at-large such as city-wide district used in a city election, where there are no wards), and
- those that do not cover the whole electorate, either two or more MM districts cover the whole jurisdiction, or MM districts are used in conjunction with single-member districts.
At-large districts are used for the U.S. House of Representatives in states that are allotted one representative.
The majority of states use single-member districts at both the federal and state levels, but Arizona, New Jersey, South Dakota and Washington use MMDs to elect all state House members.
Six other states use MMD(s) to elect some of their state legislators.
Ten other states allow the use of MMDs by law even when not used.
Five states have no law prohibiting or permitting MMDs.
Of the 7,383 seats in the 50 state legislatures, about 14 percent (1015) are elected from districts with more than one member.
Here is the source document for that info:
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Districts and the different types of voting
A particular form of MMD is at-large election where all the members of a government body are elected in one district. In a few cases, a jurisdiction is divided into multiple multi-member districts.
The alternative to MMDs are single-member districts where just one member is elected - through First Past The Post, or Alternative Voting (AKA Instant-runoff Voting). More on this later.
Unlike single-member districts, the voting systems used in MMDs were more varied. Most of these MMDs used Block Voting, where each voter could cast as many votes as there are seats to fill. There are two variations of Block Voting. Both were used in Canadian history.
There were many other choices available as well - and Canada’s MMDs are known to have used five different voting systems.
Distinguishing characteristics of MMDs
There are several distinguishing characteristics of the possible forms of voting in a MMD:
(A piece written by the Vermont Legislative Research Service provided the basic information presented here.
https://www.uvm.edu/sites/default/files/Department-of-Political-Science/vlrs/PoliticsGovernment/MMD.pdf)
The number of votes that each voter can or must cast
1. Block voting (bloc voting): Voters receive as many votes as there are open seats, and can vote no more than once for a particular candidate. All votes must be used.
The type of Block voting where voters had to cast the same number of votes, no more and no less, was also not used in Canada, judging by the number of valid votes tallied where known.
Only known instances of this in Canadian history are early election(s) in colonial Nova Scotia.
Instead Block Voting in Canada allowed for voters not to cast all their available votes, as described next.
2. Block voting as used in Canada (formal name: Bloc with partial abstention (BPA)
Voters may cast as many votes as there are open seats. and can vote no more than once for a particular candidate. Voters can elect not to use all of their votes.
3. Limited Voting
Each voter can cast more than one vote but not as many as the number of open seats.
Used in Toronto when it was a MMD, from 1886 to 1894.
4. Each voter casts just one vote.
Almost invariably this is the case where just one member is being elected but it is also the case in multi-seat contests, where it is called Single Voting.
Also, casting one vote is the rule where the seats in a MM district are filled through separate contests, as explained below in #9.
Type of votes cast
Where the voter is casting single votes, preferential votes are an option -- see #6.
5. Each voter casts just one vote - and it is non-transferable.
Single Non-Transferable Voting (SNTV) uses X voting but as no one group can (under normal circumstances) take all the seats in the district, mixed representation results. Mixed representation is the hallmark of proportional representation. Not all mixed rep is proportional but the result is more balanced and therefore more fair than a one-party sweep of multiple seats.
SNTV has not been used in any election in Canada.
6. Single Transferable Voting (PR-STV) has all the benefits of SNTV. And further it reduces the number of wasted votes/ignored voters that plague FPTP and other forms of X voting. It has the drawback of ranked voting, which some consider to be irksomely-complicated for voters.
PR-STV was used in five different provincial MMDs on the Prairies in four decades in the 1900s.
Limit of one vote per candidate or no such limit or something in between
Another distinguishing feature of voting is whether votes can be "lumped" on to a candidate or have to be cast with a limit of one for any specific candidate.
Mostly in Canadian elections, voters cannot give more than one vote to a candidate.
But in these two systems that was possible.
Neither of the systems were used in provincial or federal elections in Canada.
7. Cumulative Voting: Voters cast multiple votes and may use their votes however they wish, such as casting all of them on a single candidate or casting one or more of them for different candidates. Never used in Canada federal or provincial elections at any time. Illinois used this system previous to 1982. This system is not used in U.S. state legislative elections today.
8. Cumulative voting where each voter can give no more than say three votes for a specific candidate. This ensures a minimum size of the minority that can be assured of electing one candidate.
Cumulative Voting was used to elect some city officials in Toronto starting in 1903. Here’s how it was intended to work in that instance.
In the Toronto city election of 1903, 12 members of the Board of Education were being elected. Each voter could cast up to 12 votes, but with no more than three given to any candidate. This meant that if one-quarter of the voters gave all their three votes to a candidate, he or she would be elected. If they did that with four candidates, the four would be elected - four out of 12. Any minority smaller than a quarter of the electorate would not be assured of electing even one candidate, due to the three-vote limit.
All members' terms end at the same time or are staggered
An election may either fill all the seats of the MMD district or only a portion of the seats in a MMD. These two options can be used with almost any of the voting variants used in MMDs listed above. A single-member district cannot have elections that are staggered.
In Staggered elections in MMDs -: Two or more legislators represent the same district with elections happening in different years due to staggered terms.
If only two members, staggered elections become single-seat contests, but in MMDs with more than two seats, the staggered elections may be multi-seat contests.
Most often, in Canadian federal and provincial elections, all the seats are filled at the same time, with concurrent terms. Although on some occasions, specific districts hold their portion of the provincial vote days or weeks after others, due to local organizational, weather or transportation issues.
In Canadian experience, staggered elections were common at the municipal level. The cities of Edmonton and Calgary used staggered elections prior to the 1960s.
9. “Posts elections” - where MMDs did not mean multi-seat contests
Even where districts have more than one seat filled at the same time (either no staggered terms or the District Magnitude is high enough that staggered terms do not prevent two or more seats being filled at one time), still the seats may be filled through single-seat contests. This can be accomplished by what is termed MMDs with posts. Instead of running in a single pool of candidates, candidates are divided up, and each separate group runs for just one of the district's seats, as in a single-member district. Each voter may cast multiple votes, casting one for a candidate running for each post.
This was how BC filled the seats in its MMDs in the 1952 and 1953 elections, elections when BC was using IRV, not Block Voting, and in Toronto districts in 1908 and 1911 and in Winnipeg districts, 1914 and 1915.
10. Party Block Voting (also known as Group Ticket Voting)
The election of multiple members of the electoral college in each U.S. state (who go on to elect the president) are examples of MM districts.
But the members are not elected through Block Voting or any other system listed above.
Unusually for a MM district, each voter has just one vote. While the set-up would naturally produce mixed representation through SNTV, that is not the case.
The party with the highest popular vote (whether majority or not) is given the right to allocate all the EC seats belonging to the state.
Under Block Voting, mixed representation is not usually the case but it does happen occasionally. Under the Party Block method, mixed representation can never happen.
There are exceptions to the use of the Party Block method. In Maine and Nebraska, some of the EC seats are filled through plurality winners in portions of the states, with two seats given to the party that has the most votes across the whole state.
Like with the states using Party bloc vote or any first past the post elections or Block voting contests, in Maine and Nebraska there is no dependable proportionality of representation. Minority representation is produced only if the minority happens to be the largest group in one of the specified districts of the state. But on the other hand, sometimes a district of the state or the winner of the state-wide contest may be just a minority, with the majority of the voters (spread over one or more parties) given no representation at all.
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CANADA'S HISTORICAL USE OF MMDs
Canada in its past use of MM districts, did not ever allocate seats based on party popular vote. Instead, true to the British tradition, votes were always cast - and applied - on a candidate-by-candidate basis.
Voting in MMDs in Canadian federal and provincial elections took these forms:
Block Voting - where voters could cast as many votes as there were seats to fill and where there was no minimum of votes needed to be cast by the voter. This is and was common in municipal elections, and was used in provincial (or colonial) elections in provinces from coast to coast at one time or another.
Block Voting where voters had to cast their full number of votes or none at all. This is known to have been used in the 1758 election in Nova Scotia, and possibly in one or more subsequent elections in that province.
Limited Voting - where voter cast two votes to elect three MLAs (Toronto - 1886, 1890)
STV - major cities in Alberta and Winnipeg from 1920s to 1950s
The Posts system - BC used this system to fill the seats in its MMDs in the 1952 and 1953 elections. In these elections, BC was not using Block Voting. Instead all members, whether in single-member districts or MMDs, were elected through Alternative Voting.
The Posts method was also used in connection to a First Past the Post system in the four Toronto districts (each electing two members) in the 1908 and 1911 provincial elections, and the three Winnipeg districts in the 1914 and 1915 provincial elections (each electing two members).
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Historical MM districts in the U.S.
In the U.S., Block Voting was definitely the rule for election of legislators in MMDs, while Party Block Voting was - and is - used for election of most of the members of the Electoral College. As well, Cumulative Voting was used to elect legislators to some degree, especially in Illinois.
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MM District Votes in Pennsylvania and New York
Two clear examples of the use of MM districts in the U.S. are seen in the history of the states of Pennsylvania and New York.
Pennsylvania had multi-seat districts as well as single-member districts - 113 SMDs, 31 2-seat districts, five 3-seat districts and four 4-seat districts. This was before the Act of 1953 converted them into single-member districts.
1929 Philadelphia had 41 seats - 15 of these were in SMDs, 26 were in MMDs.
1953 Philadelphia had 39 seats - 24 of these were in SMDs, 15 were in MMDs.
Silva states "Pennsylvania’s Republican-controlled legislature appears to have favored the existence of more multi-member districts in Philadelphia when the Republican party was able to carry most or all of these districts. But, since the rise of Democratic supremacy in Philadelphia elections, the creation of more single-member districts allows the Republican party to salvage at least a few seats in some of the city’s carefully drawn districts." (so the way the districts are drawn - whether as SMDs or MMDs - was due to political considerations, not necessarily due to a question of fairness.)
In New York State, 1206 Assembly seats were filled during the state's first 76 years of existence as a state. 1086 seats (nine-tenths of them) were elected in multi-seat districts.
The situation was much the same for election of NY Senators.
From 1777 to 1846, all of NY's senatorial seats were filled in multi-seat districts.
Looking more generally, single-member districts (SMDs) became more common through 1800s.
By 1912, the Senates in 30 states were chosen wholly through SMDs, but a majority of lower-house members (House of Representatives) were still elected in multi-member districts.
In 1955, still 45 percent of the state lower-house members were elected in multi-member districts (excluding Alaska and Hawaii).
1960 three states elected all lower-house members through MM districts; 35 of the 50 states elected some of the lower-house members through MM districts and some through SMD.
Most MMDs in use had two seats but some had more than that - some had as much as five or more seats.
In the 1950s, Pennsylvania had 113 single-member, 31 2-seat, 5 3-seat and 4 4-seat districts.
1821 to 1846, New York was divided into 8 districts, each of which elected four senators. (p. 508)
Small single-member districts (SMDs) meant members were susceptible to local interests and were free-er from party discipline. (p. 506-507)
Large MMDs meant stronger party discipline, and that pushed members to concern themselves with wider more-general issues
For this reason, a move was made in NY to convert the 32 SMDs to 8 4-seat districts.
In the 1800s, it was said because SMDs are smaller, under SMDs not only were there fewer competent men to choose from but there was also greater opportunity for less able men to be elected. (p. 508)
CANADA
Canada’s electoral history is similar to that of the U.S. although it is shorter by about a hundred years - at least its post-Confederation history is. Multi-member districts were used in some place in Canada from Confederation (1867) until 1996, and were used even before 1867 as well.
In Canada, no multi-member districts are currently used in provincial or federal elections. But in the past, MM districts were used at both those levels - and in every province at one time or other.
The only province that appears not to have ever used a MM district since 1867 is Quebec.
In most of these cases, Block Voting was used, where each voter could cast as many votes as the number of seats to fill. But STV-PR was used in some cases; Limited Voting even made an appearance; and quite unusually, First Past The Post or Alternative Voting (another single-winner system) was used in MM districts through the device of holding separate contests for each seat in the district (the Posts system, #9 in the list above).
Block Voting in MM districts
The combination of multi-member districts, multiple voting and a plurality voting system often produces disproportional results. A party with the most votes in a multi-member district, even with only a third of the votes, can win all the seats.
But the use of multi-member seats is one way of responding to the growth of population in an electoral district without having to redraw electoral boundaries—just add one or more seats to those districts that show a large increase in the number of voters.
(This information was expressed in "Electoral Experimentation in BC and Canada," paper for the BC Citizens' Assembly, Weekend 2, Session 3 (available online)).
(Not mentioned is the fact that even when a district is given multiple members as an easy way to "re-district" seats, a voter in a multi-member district does not have to be given the ability to cast as many votes as the number of seats. With each voter casting only one vote in a multi-member district, the Single Non-Transferable Voting system (#5 in the list above) is created. SNTV can easily produce mixed roughly-proportional representation in the district.
MMDs opened the door to mixed representation
Under Limited Voting and even under Block Voting, mixed representation resulted on occasion.
Sometimes it is due to none of the parties running candidates for all the seats. This may be caused by accident or dis-organization - the party just did not get the candidates lined up.
Sometimes it is due to one party running just one candidate and taking a seat, leaving the rest of the seats for other party or parties. It could be due to mis-understanding, not understanding that under Block Voting there is no vote splitting of a party vote (unless a party runs more candidates than the number of seats or votes that each voter can cast). Or a short party slate could be due to a working arrangement between parties. For example, where each voter has two votes. Farm-Labour co-operation indicates that each of those parties should run one candidate.
Sometimes mixed representation was due to two parties being fairly equal in popularity, at least as measured by votes received by the foremost candidate of each. In some of these cases, the candidate that was second-most in overall popularity belongs to a different party than the most popular one, so even in a two-member district two parties have one seat each. Where there are more seats than two, this can happen more often. But even in a five-seat district, one party sometimes takes all the seats under Block Voting. The difference in vote tallies between individual candidates of the leading party was not such as to allow a candidate of another party to get a seat.
Under Block Voting, voters can judge individual candidates differently (not just vote a party slate) with some individual candidates receiving more votes than other individual candidates of the same party, with voters plumping (voting less than their full complement of votes) or actually splitting their votes among two or more parties.
One reason for this splitting can be due to voter prizing local representation (representation of their particular corner of the district) over party allegiance.
The opportunity to judge individual candidates and to cross party lines with votes arises from the wide selection of parties and candidates offered to voters in MM districts. This wide selection is present in any MM district, to one degree or another, whether or not a fair voting system is used.
Just having multiple seats ensures that voters have a wide selection of candidates, even if the result in the end is a one-party sweep.
Proportional representation (STV)
Mixed representation is more common where STV is used than under Block Voting. In fact it was always the result in Canadian STV elections where there were more than three seats.
But the application of PR in Canada has been limited. We have never had a majority of the seats filled through PR in any province. When Alberta and Manitoba used PR-STV in their major cities, those cities had only a small fraction of the population of the respective province and only a small fraction of the province's seats.
At the end of the use of PR (in the 1950s), the cities were under-represented (having fewer MLAs than their population warranted), but even if they had been represented at equal rate as rural areas, they would have elected only a fraction of the MLAs in the province.
At the most, 14 seats (out of 57) were filled through PR in any provincial election in Canadian history. But where used, STV proved itself well able to produce balanced mixed representation in each district where more than three seats were filled. Aside from electing many government party members, STV districts also elected far more than its portion of opposition members.
The most seats in a MM district using STV in Canadian history was 10. Winnipeg elected 10 MLAs through PR-STV in every election held from 1920 to 1945, and this representation was extremely fine-grained - sometimes having candidates of six different parties elected to represent the city's voters.
In Alberta, Edmonton and Calgary at the most elected seven and six MLAs respectively, and there too as many as three or four parties elected at least one MLA in a city's election contest.
=======================
Multi-member districts in Canadian history
Every province in Canada used MM districts at one time or another. Each of their experiences is described below.
QUEBEC
Quebec stands out for never using MM districts after 1867 and also for having a known history of dis-proportional election results. (Other provinces also have suffered unfair elections but they don’t talk about it!)
Quebec elections seem to have a reputation for dis-proportional results. Good examples are the 1966 wrong-winner result, the 1970 false-majority result, and the 1998 wrong-winner and false-majority result.
(see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Assembly_of_Quebec#Elections)
Quebec seems to be the only province not to have had multi-member districts ever since 1867. (The unitary character of single-winners in FPTP may have reflected the authoritarian nature of the province's political culture of that time.)
Prior to Confederation, Quebec used MM districts -- when it was a colony from 1792 to 1838 and 1840 to 1867 when it was part of the United Province.
From 1792 to 1829 most of its colonial legislators (members of the Legislative Assembly of Lower Canada) were elected in two-member districts. Only four were elected in single-member districts.
It seems there was some adjustment in 1830 but MM districts remained in use.
1834 -- The general election of 1834 allowed voters in Lower Canada to choose 88 deputies to represent 46 districts - four single-member districts and 42 2-seat districts.
After provincehood/Confederation in 1867, Quebec switched to solely using single member districts with districts being divided and sub-divided as the number of members increased.
Order of the discussion - Provinces other than Quebec
The next sections will discuss the use of MMDS in:
Federal ridings, Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, BC, Ontario, Alberta, Manitoba, Saskatchewan, Newfoundland and Labrador, and PEI.
From 1867, some federal ridings, Nova Scotia provincial elections and New Brunswick provincial elections used MM districts. Each used at least one MM district for a hundred years or more (to 1966, 1973 and 1978 respectively).
BC joined Confederation in 1871, and from that year until 1990 it elected almost all or at least some of its MLAs in MM districts.
PEI joined Confederation in 1873, and from then to 1996 all its MLAs were elected in MM districts. (Below it is described last as it was the last province to use MMs.)
The Ontario provincial elections of 1886 and 1890 used an MM district.
The Alberta provincial election of 1909 used two MM districts, and from then until 1956 every election used at least one MM district.
The Manitoba provincial election of 1914 used an MM district. From then on to 1952, Manitoba used at least one MM district in each election.
Saskatchewan provincial elections from 1920 to 1967 used three MM districts.
Newfoundland and Labrador joined Confederation in 1949 and until 1975 used at least one MM district in each of its elections.
====================================
Multi-member Federal ridings
From 1867 to 1966, Canadian elections used one or more two-seat districts.
These two-member ridings were:
Halifax 1867 to 1966 (the first and one of the last ridings to have multiple members)
Ottawa 1872 to 1933
Cape Breton, N.S. 1872-1903
Pictou, N.S.1872-1903
St. John City and County, N.B. 1872-1896
Hamilton, Ontario 1872-1903
West Toronto (Toronto West) 1892-1904
Victoria, BC 1871-1904 (1871 under the name Victoria District)
In PEI: King's County 1873-1896;
Queen's County 1873-1896; 1904-1966 (one of the last ridings to have MM)
Prince County 1873-1896.
The reason for the creation of some of these two-member seats was to simply increase the seat count (representation) for a city without having to create two single-member districts. Otherwise, perhaps they were used to allow a Liberal voter to give one vote to a Catholic Liberal candidate and one to a Protestant Liberal candidate; Conservatives likewise.
In Victoria, BC, religious equity does not seem to have been the reason. Two Liberals were elected in 1871, 1872, and 1874. In 1878, Victorians elected both the colourful Liberal Amor De Cosmos and Conservative powerhouse John A. Macdonald. This was followed by two Conservatives 1882-1891.
The ability of a MMD to reflect religious diversity was shown by Victoria‘s first two MPs being the first Jew to sit in the House of Commons, the other the eccentric De Cosmos.
In all these multi-seat federal districts, election was by Block Voting.
In most of these elections one party took both seats in the district.
The same held true for MM districts in BC for most of the time when that province had MM districts. In most (or a great many) cases, one party took all the seats in each MM provincial district.
I came across a study of MM districts used in federal elections -
Norman Ward "Voting in Two-member Constituencies"
in Voting in Canada (edited by John C. Courtney), 1967.
11 ridings had two members in all or part of the 1872 to 1968 period.
Block Voting was used in these districts.
The last two (Halifax and Queen's in PEI) were divided into single-member districts in 1968.
Looking at the individual elections in each of those MM districts, Ward found in most cases (53 out of 62) all the seats went to just one party,
Only in eight or nine was mixed representation elected.
================================
Nova Scotia
1758 Nova Scotia held the first government election in what would be Canada. Interestingly, this first Canadian election was held using multi-member districts:
4 members from Halifax Township, 2 members from Lunenburg Township, and 16 members from the province at large, for a total of 22 members.
But it was not until 1847 that the elected members took the reins of government out of the hands of appointed colonial officials. And over the next 25 years NS achieved several other leaps forward in democratic accountability.
1854 NS was the first colony in British North America to extend the right to vote to all adult male subjects, resident in the colony for five years or more, even those who did not own property.
1870 NS adopted secret voting. This was the second provincial election after NS joined Confederation.
For much of its history, NS used a mixture of single-member districts and multi-member districts.
In 1867 only a few of its MLAs were elected in single-member districts. Most were elected in two-member districts, and two districts - Halifax and Pictou - elected three members each. The 1867 election was a tight two-party contest. With Block Voting used, almost every MM district elected a one-party sweep of the district seats. Only Inverness and Cumberland elected a MLA of each party. The Confederation Party, by its vote count, was due 15 of the province’s 38 seats but only won a seat in Inverness and one in Cumberland.
MM districts would be a feature of NS elections until 1978. Since 1981 NS has been using only single-member districts.
Cape Breton elected two members from 1867 to 1916, four members 1916-1925. Prior to the 1925 election, the district was broken up. Two of its successors, Cape Breton East and Cape Breton West, elected 2 members from 1925 to 1933.
Yarmouth elected two members from 1867 to 1933, one MLA 1933-1949, two MLAs 1949 to 1981 and one MLA in each election since 1981.
Colchester was a two-member district from 1867 to 1978, then broken up and converted into single-member districts before the 1978 election.
Inverness elected two members from 1867 to 1981. In 1981 it was broken up into two separate single-member districts. The Inverness district was re-formed in 1993 but was given only one member.
The 1920 and 1925 elections appear to have been the high point of the use of MM districts in Nova Scotia. Every district elected multiple members, through Block Voting.
At least two members were elected in each district.
Cumberland and Pictou elected three members.
Cape Breton elected four members in 1920. (As two districts, it elected four in 1925 as well.)
Halifax elected five members.
In 1925, Cumberland elected mixed representation - the single Labour candidate in the district was elected. As well, the district elected two Liberal-Conservatives, one the incumbent Farmer MLA.
Cape Breton
The Cape Breton district elected two members to the Nova Scotia House of Assembly from 1867 to 1916.
1916 and 1920 it elected four members. In 1920, Cape Breton elected three Independent-Labour and a Farmer-Labour candidate.
In 1920, when it had four MLAs, Block Voting inflated the vote count. Cape Breton voters cast 73,000 votes. After the break-up into three districts, with each voter casting no more than two votes, the total vote count went down to 59,000. In each case likely about the same number of voters (25,000 to 30,000) voted.
Before the next election (1925), the Cape Breton district was broken up. So was the neighbouring district of Richmond.
Their successors, Cape Breton East(?), Cape Breton Centre and Richmond-Cape Breton West, each elected 2 members from 1925 to 1933.
In 1925 the Liberal-Conservatives won a clean sweep of the seats.
In 1933 Cape Breton was broken up into three districts.
One of them, Cape Breton East, was a SMD.
Another, Cape Breton Centre, elected two members from 1925 to 1933. (Two Liberal-Conservatives sat as members for the district during this time.
Another, Richmond-Cape Breton West, also elected two members from 1925 to 1933.
In 1933 these districts were broken up and replaced by SMDs.
=========================
1949 Nova Scotia general election
27 single-member districts and five MM districts: Yarmouth, Colchester, Inverness, Lunenburg and Kings.
Each MM elected a two-seat sweep for a single party.
Since 1981 NS has been using only single-member districts.
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New Brunswick
New Brunswick had a long and extensive use of multi-member districts.
NB used Block Voting in each of its MM districts each time, and the result was usually one-party sweeps.
Of the provinces of Canada, New Brunswick had the most thought-out scheme of MM districts. The districts were based on county boundaries, so the districts had organic actual boundaries on the ground (as opposed to the arbitrary artificial boundaries of single-member districts elsewhere). The varying population figures of the counties was compensated by varying the number of seats in the districts.
From 1926 to 1967, each of the province's 15 counties was a district. The cities of Saint John and Moncton were districts in their own rights. These 17 districts elected members using Block Voting.
Under the redistribution of 1967, all six of New Brunswick's cities became electoral districts, and Saint John County was split into two districts, each electing one MLA. This was the first time since 1946 that there were some single-member districts in NB.
The 1974 election was the first time in NB’s history that every district returned only one member using the FPTP system.
New Brunswick used MM districts from 1867 to 1973.
There were occasionally single-member districts as well, but members elected in MM districts predominated in the NB elections. Sometimes only a handful of members were elected in single-member districts. However, despite the potential of the MM districts that covered most of the province, New Brunswick elections were plagued by one-party sweeps of the districts, caused by the Block Voting system that was in use.
1895
2 1-seat 8 2-seat 1 3-seat 5 4-seat
Total 41 members
Single-seat
Victoria
Madawaska
2-seat
St. John County
Queens
Sunbury
Kent
Gloucester
Carleton
Restigouche
Albert
3-seat
Kings
4-seat
York
Westmorland
Charlotte
Northumberland
St. John City
1948 election
The election was held using 17 districts, electing between two and five members each, through Block Voting. Carleton, which elected 2 Progressive-Conservatives and a Liberal, was the only district where mixed representation was produced. The rest each produced one-party sweeps.
1967 Northumberland was a MM district. The NDP made its first NB appearance in this district running three candidates, and electing none.
Saint John City 1795-1973 (under name St. John Centre 1967-1973)
The Saint John district dates back to pre-Confederation 1700s. From the date of its creation to 1973, it elected multiple members.
It elected multiple members through the block voting system -- two members prior to 1892 and four members from 1892 to 1973.
1944 election had just one single-member district - Moncton.
1948 election no single-member seats
There would be no single-member seats again until 1967. Seven years later there would be only one type of district – single-member districts. MM districts were abolished in 1973.
1967
4 single-member districts 4
7 2-seat district 14
6 3-seat district 18
3 4-seat district 12
2 5-seat district 10
Total 58
1970
4 1-seat district 4
7 2-seat district 14
6 3-seat district 18
3 4-seat district 12
2 5-seat district 10
Total 58
Single-seat districts
Saint John West
Bathurst
Campbellton
Edmundston
2-seat districts
Queens - 1 Lib 1 P-C mixed rep.
Fredericton
Victoria
Saint John East
Albert
Sunbury 2 P-Cs
York 2 members 1970 P-Cs took both
3-seat districts
Carleton
Kings 3 Liberals
Moncton
Madawaska
Restigouche
Kent
4-seat districts
Saint John Centre 3 P-Cs, 1 Liberal mixed rep
Westmorland - 4 Liberals
Charlotte 4 P-Cs
5-seat districts
Gloucester
Northumberland 5 Liberal
In 1973 New Brunswick changed to single-member districts, electing through First Past The Post. NB has never used MM district since that time.
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British Columbia
Prior to 1990, British Columbia had many multi-member districts. At one time BC elected almost all of its MLAs in MM districts. Otherwise, there always were some single-member districts but these were used in conjunction with districts electing two, three, four, five and occasionally six members.
BC used Block Voting in each MM district, except for the 1952 and 1953 elections.
The 1952 and 1953 elections were special cases. Alternative Voting was used, with each seat being filled independently in separate elections.
The largest of the multi-member districts were to be found in the metropolitan areas of Vancouver and Victoria, but much of the province had multi-member districts at some time between 1871 and 1990.
Generally, one in four MLAs were elected from multi-member districts for most of the 1871-1986 period. In 1986, just shy of half the members were elected in MM districts. This was the last election to use MM districts. Only with the 1991 general election and ever since were all the BC MLAs elected in single-member districts.
Here are some highlights of BC's use of MM districts:
1871-1878
3 SMDs, 6 2-member districts, 2 3-seat districts, 1 4-seat district (Victoria City)
of 25 total members, only 3 were elected in SMDs
1898
24 SMDs, 3 2-member district, 2 4-seat districts (Vancouver City, Victoria City)
of 38 total members, 14 elected in MMDs
(All four seats in Vancouver City went to Opposition candidates in 1898
all four seats in Victoria City went to government candidates in 1898.)
1903-1912
31 SMDs, 1 2-member district, 1 4-seat district (, 1 5-member district (Vancouver City)
of 42 total members, 11 elected in MMDs
(All five seats in Vancouver City went to Conservative candidates in 1903.
All four seats in Victoria City went to Liberal candidates in 1903.)
1916-1933
37 SMDs, 1 4-seat district (Victoria City), 1 6-member district (Vancouver City)
of 47 total members, 10 were elected in MMDs
Five of the six seats in Vancouver City went to Liberal candidates in 1916. One went to a
Conservative. The Liberal party ran a full slate.
The unsuccessful Liberal candidate was Patrick Donnelly, perhaps a Catholic, definitely an Irishman - Ireland was neutral in WWI at the time.
The four seats in Victoria City went to Liberal candidates in 1916.
1933
34 SMDs 3 2-member districts, 1 3-seat district, 1 4-seat district
of 47 total members, 13 were elected in MMDs
1934-1937
35 SMDs 3 2-member districts, 1 3-seat district, 1 4-seat district
of 48 total members, 13 were elected in MMDs
1941-1953 36 SMDs 3 2-member districts, 2 3-seat districts
of 48 total members, 12 were elected in MMDs
1956-1963 33 SMDs, 6 2-member districts, 2 3-seat districts.
of 52 total members, 18 elected in MMDs
1966-1975 41 SMDs, 7 2-member district,
of 55 total members, 14 elected in MMDs
1979-1983 43 SMDs, 7 2-member districts
of 57 total members, 14 elected in MMDs
1986 35 SMDs, 17 2-member districts
of 69 total members, 34 were elected in MMDs (just shy of half)
(from Electoral History of BC elections 1871-1986
Party identification was not used generally prior to 1903, so whether representation elected in a district was mixed or not, and proportional or not, cannot easily be determined in most cases.
The first Labour MLA was certainly elected in 1894 (although an earlier success, in 1886, is sometimes stated). Robert Macpherson, running on behalf of the pro-nationalization Nationalist Party, was elected In 1894 in Vancouver City. The other MLA elected there was a reform-minded newspaperman.
Block Voting in BC's MM districts
Each voter was allowed to cast as many votes as there were seats to fill in BC's multi-seat districts. (Electoral History of BC, p. 5)
The effect of Block Voting is shown clearly in 1966 in Vancouver Burrard -
the two SC candidates got the same number of votes (7584). The SC voters apparently voted solidly for the two SC candidates, giving both of their votes to the two and to no others. The two NDP candidates each got more than 9000 votes (although a slightly different number). The NDP won both seats.
That election also saw one-party sweeps in the multi-seat districts of Vancouver Centre, Vancouver East, Vancouver Little Mountain, Vancouver Point Grey, Vancouver South and Victoria.
But occasionally two parties shared the seats in a MM district in BC.
For example, Vancouver-Point Grey elected a Liberal MLA and a SC MLA in 1974, and a SC MLA and an NDP MLA in 1986.
BC dropped its MM districts after 1986. More on that below.
=========================
Ontario
By the late 1880s, it was seen that under Block Voting, the largest group could take all the seats, leaving all other groups without representation. The first alternative used in Canada to the multiple plurality system was Limited Voting. In its only application in Canada history, from 1886 to 1894, the Toronto district was given three seats and each voter could cast just two votes.
Each party did not not run more than two candidates, for fear of splitting their votes, so mixed representation was produced in each contest in the Toronto district in 1886 and 1890. No one party took all the seats.
Following this experience. the district was broken up into three single-member districts - North Toronto, East Toronto, West Toronto and South Toronto.
In 1908, these three districts were given a second seat. In the two elections when these districts were MM districts, the seats were filled through separate seat/post elections. The separate elections made it less glaringly obvious that the largest group - and only the largest group - took both seats.
Ottawa provincial district - Block Voting
Despite Toronto’s experience with Limited Voting, when the Ottawa provincial district was a MM district from 1894 to 1908, just after Toronto’s Limited Voting experience ended, Block Voting was used to fill the two seats in the capital city.
Block Voting meant mostly one–party sweeps in the next four elections - and about double the number of votes to count than would have been cast under STV.
1894 two Liberals filled the seats
1898 one Liberal and one Conservative
1902 two Conservatives
1905 two Liberals.
After Ottawa was divided into two single-member districts in 1908, Ontario never again over the last 115 years had a MM district.
After the United Farmers were elected government in 1919, there was a proposal to group Toronto districts into a MM district and to have the city’s members elected through STV but it did not go forward. (Proportional Representation Review, April 1923)
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Alberta
Prior to 1959, Alberta used one or more multi-member districts in every election except 1905, the province's first one.*
At a high point in 1955, 13 MLAs were elected in MM districts. This was just a fraction of the province's 61 members but it is interesting to note that almost a third of the opposition members elected that year were elected in the two cities, which also elected its due share of government members.
The fairness of STV as compared to FPTP is shown starkly in the result of the 1952 election when six of the eight Opposition MLAs elected were from the cities although the cities' 13 seats were only about 21 percent of the province's seats while the mass bulk of seats (filled through single-winner Alternative Voting) produced only 2 opposition members. Each rural member was elected by a majority of the votes in the district but there was not any attempt at Proportionality outside the cites and the result shows this.
It is not true to say that in each use of MM district in Alberta, mixed balanced representation was elected. Without single voting, the largest group sometimes took all the seats. But where STV was used, each time mixed representation did result each time. There were three instances when STV vote transfer made no effect on the front runners in the first count. In these cases the same people wold have been elected under SNTV as under STV.
Multi-member districts in Alberta
Bold shows mixed representation
2P means candidates of two parties were elected
3P means candidates of three parties were elected
4P means candidates of four parties were elected.
Calgary Edmonton Medicine Hat Army
1905 (no MM districts)
1909 2 (1 L, 1 C) 2 (SMD) Block Voting
1913 (SMDs) 2 (SMD) Block Voting
1917* (SMDs) (SMDs) (SMD) 2* Block Voting
1921 5 (2 Lab, 1 Lib, 2 Ind) 5 2 (1UFA, 1Labour) Block Voting
1926 5 (4P) 5 (4P) 2 (1 L, 1C) STV
1930 6 (3P) 6 (4P) STV
1935 6 (3P) 6 (3P) STV
1940 5 (2P)* 5 (2P)* STV
1944 5 (3P) 5 (4P) STV
1948 5 (4P) 5 (3P) STV
1952 6 (3P) 7 (4P) STV
1955 6 (3P) 7 (3P) STV
1959 (no MM districts)
*1917 had a MM district only by virtue of the fact that the two army representatives elected overseas were elected through Block Voting in a two-seat district. One of the successful candidates was Nursing Sister Robert MacAdams, the second female legislator elected in the British Empire. She used the Block Voting system to her advantage - her campaign advice to the voters was “give one of your votes to the man of your choice and give the second to the sister.”
* 1917 Army was non-partisan.
Independent candidates (of two genders!) were elected.
* 1940 Social Credit (government) and anti-SC Fusion candidates were elected.
One-party sweeps in the above table:
1909 Edmonton elected two Liberals
1913 Edmonton elected two Liberals
1921 Edmonton elected five Liberals. Candidates of two genders were elected.
Following the 1955 election, the Alberta government dropped the MM districts and switched all of Alberta to single-member districts. It also switched from preferential voting to X voting and FPTP.
In the next election (1959), Edmonton experienced the first one-party sweep it had had since 1921. All the Edmonton seats were taken by Social Credit (government) candidates.
Between the 1955 and 1959 elections, the number of Edmonton sets was increased from 7 to 9. But if Edmonton was under-represented, that was no reason to change to single-member districts. Simply upping the number of seats in the Edmonton district would have addressed the issue.
It is sometimes said that Edmonton was under-represented in its non-FPTP electoral scheme. That seems to have been a thing that grew worse through the years.
Edmonton’s under-representation
1926
Edmonton 1926 20,000 valid votes 5 seats 4000 votes per seat
overall Alberta 1926 180,000 votes 61 seats 3000 votes per seat
Edmonton 1926 5 seats 8 percent of Alberta's overall seats
Edmonton 1926 20,000 votes 11 percent of Alberta's total votes
1948
Edmonton 1948 46,000 valid votes 5 seats 9200 votes per seat
overall Alberta 1948 300,000 votes 57 seats 5300 votes per seat
Edmonton 1948 5 seats 9 percent of Alberta's overall seats
Edmonton 1948 46,000 votes 15 percent of Alberta's total votes
1955
Edmonton 1955 77,000 votes 5 seats 9200 votes per seat
overall Alberta 1955 380,000 votes 61 seats 5300 votes per seat
Edmonton 1955 7 seats 11 percent of Alberta's overall seats
Edmonton 1955 77,000 votes 20 percent of Alberta's total votes
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Manitoba
Manitoba used a STV system in Winnipeg from 1920 to 1952 and the Alternative Vote in the rest of the province starting in 1927.
1914 and 1915 Winnipeg MMD (two districts) = Posts election system
1920-1952 Winnipeg MMD = STV
1920-1945 10-seat district
1949 and 1952 Winnipeg three four-seat districts.
St. Boniface 2-seat district
By the mid-1950s, Manitoba had grown unhappy with its electoral system, says Hoffman in The Gerrymander and the Commission …
Hoffman says “Unlike most other provinces at the time, Manitoba did not elect its MLAs in single-member districts under a first past-the-post system…” But in the early 1950s, actually only Ontario and Quebec were not electing all or at least some of their MLAs in MM districts.
The early 1950s was a high point of the use of MM districts.
1952 Electoral Snapshot
About 25 percent of the provincial legislators were elected in MMDs.
Total MLAs MMD MLAs percent that were elected in MMDs
NL 28 6 21 percent
NS 37 10 27 percent
NB 52 52 100 percent
PEI 30 30 100 percent
QU 92 0 0 percent
ON 90 0 0 percent
MB 57 14 25 percent
SK 53 7 13 percent
AB 61 13 21 percent
BC 48 12 25 percent
Total 548 144 26 percent overall.
Hoffman wrote that STV had succeeded in granting a political voice to small parties and breaking the control of party bosses.
But voters and politicians had grown dissatisfied with STV. Even though STV was used only partially, the distribution of the vote meant that no one party was taking a majority of the seats, even with the help given the leading party under Alternative Voting in the majority of the districts.
Under AV, a candidate must take a majority of the votes (either first preference or back-up preferences) but in most cases the elected candidate was the same as was leading in the First Count, with no representation accorded to the other parties just as they would be ignored under FPTP.
So STV, due to its democratic proportionality, had prevented the formation of a majority government in Manitoba. Dissatisfied with perpetual coalition governments, politicians looked to some other system of election. (Coalition governments are common in PR countries in Europe so it should not have been a problem. Could it be that voters would be happier to see FPTP give majority government to a party that a majority of the voters did not vote for. Such “false-majority” governments are common under FPTP. Or would they prefer to see the election system produce the representation that the voters voted for?)
Progressive (United Farmers) took two majority governments in the 1920s, each time with but a minority of the votes. The Liberal-Progressive party was formed in the 1920s and took three majority governments, each time with but a minority of the votes. A broader coalition (which drew together the Liberal-Progressives and the Progressive-Conservatives) held power through the 1940s.
Hoffman wrote “Surprisingly, the public was open to the call for change, largely because the multi-member districts used in STV had prevented voters from being able to call any politician their own.” (But was that really a thing? It may have been more a problem of choosing which of the multiple members elected in your district the voter should turn to for help. An excess of choice!)
Voters were also said to be unhappy with the unequal populations between the multi-member districts.
It is generally said that voters (at least voters in Winnipeg) were unhappy about the rural-urban disparity. In each of the Winnipeg districts (Winnipeg Centre, Winnipeg North and Winnipeg South) electing four members, there were 47,000 voters and about 21,000 votes were cast. In most of the single-member districts, fewer than 5000 votes were cast. Nine of the 43 single-member districts exceeded that number, thus receiving as many votes as were the portion for each city MLA. So the disparity does not seem so bad. And the use of MM districts made addressing this disparity easy - simply give each district more seats, with no re-drawing of districts necessary. But for some reason apparently this was not thought of.
As things worked out, the abolition of MM districts and STV did not guarantee that a majority government would be produced.
In 1958, no party took a majority of the seats. No party took more than 41 percent of the vote and FPTP did not produce a false-majority government. A minority Conservative government lasted just one year.
If Manitoba was plagued by coalition government, after the return to FPTP it continued to experience minority government, plus the added mis-representaton and minority elections of FPTP.
Under STV/AV, minority government had found common ground with other parties and had stayed in power the usual full number of years.
But after the return to FPTP, the P-C government thought it worth going to the polls early, hoping to win power through the kind of accidental results that FPTP produces.
And the scheme worked - the Conservatives won majority government with just 30,000 more votes than it had received a year earlier. Its vote count increased by 25 percent but its seat count went up by 40 percent. The opposition vote hardly dropped at all, just five percent, but the oppsition seats were a full one-third less after the election than they had been in 1958.
(https://www.electionsmanitoba.ca/downloads/HistoricalResultsSummaries/1958.pdf)
Hoffman reports that the public and political elites were not happy with the abolishment of multi-member districts and STV without additional reforms “as it would signal a return to the partisan gerrymanders of the past.”
Independent (non-partisan) reapportionment commissions were seen as the crucial ingredient in a return to single-member districts and the first-past-the-post system. The Electoral Divisions Amendment Act of 1955 provided for the creation of an independent commission comprised of the Chief Justice of Manitoba, the province's chief electoral officer, and the president of the University of Manitoba.
The commission was instructed to draw single-member districts on the basis of community of interests, means of communication (and transportation), the natural features of the province, municipal boundaries, and other similar factors.
However, the commission was instructed to allow disparity between urban and rural districts, with urban districts to contain seven voters for every four rural voters. Districts in each classification could only differ by plus or minus five percent. In 1968, the allowable urban/rural disparity was dropped (districts henceforth were to be equal-sized). Discretion was allowed though - a variation of plus or minus 25 percent was allowed on the median size.
Those variations if combined means that on the basis of a 100-voter median, one district could have 75 and another 125. Not much different than the 7-to-4 ratio allowed under the 1955 legislation.
The permissible variance then became plus or minus 10 percent, although districts north of the 53rd Parallel could vary by as much as 25 percent. So with 100 as base, 110 or 90 or as few as 75 in the Northland.
But the signal achievement of Manitoba, now copied by all other provinces, is to remove politics from the drawing of the district boundaries.
We should extend that fairness by having as many MM districts as possible, so that we have as few boundaries, however drawn, as possible to divide the votes into small and arbitrary districts. Perhaps separating voters from their friends, from their neighbours and from their favoured candidates. And the small district can elect no more than one, forcing many, perhaps a majority to have no representation at all under FPTP and ensuring only a bare majority under Alternative Voting.
And further we should extend that move toward fairness by moving control over the electoral system away from politicians. Let’s form a citizen’s assembly or non-partisan commission that would decide on the system to be used. Let’s remove the power of politicians to set the rules under which their bosses (the voters) show their will - to hire or fire the governments.
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Saskatchewan
Three Saskatchewan provincial districts were MMDs from 1920 to 1967. These were Regina City, Saskatoon City and Moose Jaw City. Block Voting was used, under which each voter cast as many votes as there were seats. Usually one party took all the seats when the number of seats was less than five. When five members were elected, in Saskatoon City in 1964, mixed representation was elected.
Regina City elected two members 1921 to 1948, three members in 1952 and 1956, and four members in 1960. Only in one multi-seat contest (1925) was mixed representation elected.
Before the 1964 election, Regina City was divided into four districts. Two of these new districts - Regina East and Regina West - were two-member districts themselves. (If six seats were wanted for the Regina area,the existing Regina City could have elected all six in one district. With STV, PR would have been achieved at least in that district. But the District Magnitude was reduced to two at the most, with two MLAs of the Regina area elected in single-member districts.)
Under Block Voting, the Regina area elected 5 CCF and just one Liberal. No district elected MLAs of more than one party; in all four Regina districts, Block Voting and FPTP elected just one party, with no attempt at proportionality. The sole non-CCF MLA was elected in a single-member district - Regina South.
Before the 1967 election, all of Saskatchewan's multi-member districts were broken up and converted into single-member districts.
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Newfoundland and Labrador
Newfoundland and Labrador had three MM districts in its history.
St. John’s East 2 members 1949 and 1951
St. John’s West 2 members 1949 and 1951
Harbour Main-Bell Island (later known as Harbour Main) 1949-1975
Each elected two members in each election in 1949 (when NL joined Confederation) and 1951.
Harbour Main-Bell Island – Two Conservatives or two Liberals were elected each time except for the 1952 and 1959 elections.
After two Conservatives were elected in 1972 in the district, the Harbour Main district was disbanded and formed into two single-member districts. Since that change, Harbour Main has mostly elected Conservatives.
The winner often won through plurality. In 1993 Liberal Don Whelan took the seat with less than half the votes.
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End of Multi-member districts in Canada
By 1973, New Brunswick was one of the last places in Canada using MM districts. Only NFLD, PEI and BC still used MM districts.
That year New Brunswick changed to single-member districts, electing through First past the post. It has never used MM district since that time.
Already Alberta and Manitoba had moved to single-member districts.
Nearby Halifax, the last federal riding to elect multiple members, had been converted into single-member ridings following the 1966 election.
Saskatchewan had dropped its MM districts in mid-1960s.
Alberta and Manitoba had dropped their MM districts in the mid-1950s.
1974 was the first New Brunswick election in which there were only single-member districts, established by the 1973 electoral redistribution.
New Brunswick's redistribution of 1973 converted all the MM districts into single-member districts and changed the voting system from Block voting to FPTP. (Prior to the redistribution, NB had had four single-member districts. These needed no change.)
After New Brunswick's redistribution, only NFLD, PEI and BC still used MM districts.
Newfoundland was quick to follow New Brunswick’s example, converting to single-member districts in 1975.
The other two would each drop MM districts in the 1990s.
BC
BC’s last election to use a mixture of MM districts and single-member districts was in 1986.
There were 17 two-member constituencies in this election, the last election to be held with them. Voters in these places were allowed two votes (block voting), and generally used them both on the same party. Only one district elected both a SC and a NDP MLA. This was Vancouver-Point Grey where two women, an NDP-er and a SC-er (Kim Campbell, later a Canadian prime minister), were elected.
All other districts elected either two SC-ers (12 districts) or two NDP-ers (four districts), with no representation given to the minority vote in the district. This helped ensure the government's capture of the most seats. (It also makes the "popular vote," the votes cast, not truly reflective of the sentiment of the voters, due to some voters casting two votes and others only one.)
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Prince Edward Island
Prince Edward Island (PEI) had two-member districts at the provincial level throughout its history - up to the 1996 election. The 1996 PEI election was the first election in the province's history to not use multiple-seat districts.
Previous to 1996, since 1873, PEI's entry into Confederation, the province had been divided into 15 or 16 districts, each electing two members.
Each district elected a member of the Legislative Assembly and a member of the Legislative Council. In the electoral contests Councillor candidates ran against Councillor candidates; Assemblyman candidates ran against Assemblyman candidates.
(As well, from 1873 to 1896 PEI had three multi-member federal ridings:
King's County 1873-1896
Queen's County 1873-1896
Prince County 1873-1896.
The three ridings covered the whole province. Each elected two MPs. Taking the early Dominion’s Liberal-Conservative party as being Conservative, from 1873 to 1891, each riding elected two of the same party each time, with only three exceptions where mixed representation was elected. )
PEI’s provincial districts were unusual in that they elected their two members in separate contests. Voters in the Legislative Council contest also voted in the Assemblyman contest but not all the voters in the latter voted in the first. And for many years the two members for the district did not sit in the same chamber. But from 1893 to 1996, the two members in each district did sit in the same chamber so that made the PEI districts more closely conform to the usual definition of MM district.
This is how the PEI contests worked. All eligible voters within a district were able to vote in the election of the Assemblyman; landowners within a district were able to vote in the election of the district’s Councillor and of its Assemblyman. That is, a landowner could vote for a Council candidate in each district in which he or she owned property, and anyone with a Council vote also had an Assembly vote in each district. A person owning land in more than one of the 15 (or 16 districts after 1966) could vote many times, twice in each district in which he or she owned land. Thus, landowners, if they were extremely mobile, could theoretically cast 30 (or 32) votes, while a non-landowner could cast just one vote, in the district in which he or she resided. (Later the right of multiple-voting in multiple districts was extended to the spouse of the landowner.) (http://www.revparl.ca/11/2/11n2_88e_Driscoll.pdf)
Each contest was conducted through First past the post.
The old districts made sense on the ground. The province has three counties. Historically each county was divided into five districts so that made 15 districts. PEI had 15 districts until 1966, when a 16th district (Queens 6th (Charlottetown)) was added.
Each district contest sees about 3,000 votes cast. Voter turn-out is high. Historically 80 percent of eligible voters voted. Such small scale representation is the closest Canada comes to direct democracy, with most voters having personal contact with his or her member. (If Direct Democracy is government where collective decisions are made by direct voting contributions of individual citizens, which is commonly held to be the case, PEI may be the closest we come to it in Canada but is still far from being an instance of legitimate Direct Democracy!)
Until 1893, PEI was bicameral with the Assembly sitting separately from the Legislative Council. This made for difficulties when opposing parties held majorities in the two houses.Starting in 1893 the two groups of elected members sat together in one chamber. (One of the achievements of the government in this period was bringing in secret voting in 1913.)
In 1893, the right to the property vote and voting multiple times was debated but was retained. They would stay in use until 1996.
In 1996, PEI converted to 27 single-member districts, electing one MLA each, through FPTP. Since then, Canada has not used any Multimember districts at the provincial or federal level.
PEI’s dual First Past The Post elections were not PR. This was shown starkly in 1935 when one party took all the seats in the province. The election was a two-party fight, so the winner in each contest received a majority of the votes cast, whether citizen or landowner. But the result was not proportional - the Conservative Party received 42 percent of the vote but took no seats. This is a stark example of the dis-proportionality that can occur even where the winners receive a majority of the vote in the district. (Note that Alternative Voting (IRV) (what many call ranked votes) under certain circumstances could produce just as dis-proportional results as the result in PEI in 1935.)
And the result under 27 single-member districts has produced dis-proportional results also. The 2015 election was a false-majority election, wherein a party won a majority of the seats but had received fewer than a majority of the vote. In the 2019 election, the Green Party was named Official Opposition for the first time in Canadian history. The Liberal party actually deserved more seats than the Greens but won only two seats so was not named Official Opposition.
And it seems that in the 2019 PEI election, in most of the districts, the winner won with less than a majority of the vote. It seems that in the province’s districts, only six MLAs won with a majority of the vote.
Sampling of first and second candidates:
Souris PC 45 percent of the vote. Lib 29 percent
Georgetown-Pownall PC 49 percent of the vote. Green 28 percent
Montague Kilmuir PC 46 percent of the vote. Lib 27 percent
Belfast Murray PC 53 percent of the vote. Green 27 percent majority win
Stratford-Keppoch PC 43 percent of the vote. Lib 30 percent
Stanhope-Marshfield PC 40 percent of the vote. Lib 36 percent
Charlottetown-Winslowe Lib 42 percent of the vote. Green 31 percent
Charlottetown-Victoria Park Green 41 percent of the vote. Lib 28 percent
Charlottetown-West Royalty Lib 35 percent of the vote. Green 32 percent
Cornwall-Meadowbank Lib 48 percent of the vote. Green 33 percent
Rustico-Emerald PC 58 percent of the vote. Lib 27 percent majority win
Kensington-Malpeque PC 62 percent of the vote. Green 25 percent majority win
Summerside-South Green 44 percent of the vote. Lib 32 percent
Evangeline Lib 45 percent of the vote. Green 31 percent
If PEI returned to multiple-seat districts, but constrained each voter to casting just one vote, the result would doubtless be more proportional than that.
And the small size of PEI districts means that grouping districts is fairly easy.
Grouping districts to form multi-seat districts - is the fundamental base of STV or regional or province-wide MMP. Taking that first step would be easy in PEI.
PEI’s counties could again be the base for a scheme of MM districts.
Queens and Prince Counties are both about 2000 sq. kms. in size.
Kings County is about 1700 sq. kms. in size.
PEI overall is 6000 sq. kms. in size.
Even a district covering the whole province of PEI would be smaller than rural provincial districts in Alberta.
Alberta is 640,000 sq. kms.
87 districts cover the whole province, but most of these are just in Edmonton and Calgary so cover only a very small amount of the overall territory.
41 districts cover almost all the province - so about 15,000 sq. kms per district on the average.
The average rural MLA in Alberta is alone responsible for an area more than twice the size of the whole province of PEI.
In PEI six MLAs represent Charlottetown. This leaves 21 to cover the rest of the island. Each county could be a multi-member district with 7 MLAs on the average. The 7 or so members would collectively represent an area that is less than half the size of the district represented by one MLA in Alberta. And with 7 MLAs elected through regional MMP or STV, a high portion of votes would be represented - a much fairer result that we see under the present system where as much as 65 percent of the votes cast in a district are ignored.
In the 2019 PEI election, the MLAs were elected with just a relatively small number of the votes.
Some of them were elected with only 40 or so percent of the votes in their district.
the winner in Souris-Elmira received just 1300 votes
Georgetown-Pownall 1500 votes
Montague 1400 votes
Charlotteown-Winslowe 1400 votes
Kensington 2000 votes
This sampling produced an average of 1500 votes.
If this was the same across the province, the 27 MLAs were elected with about 41,000 votes.
But under a STV election where typically 80 or so per cent of the voters see their vote actually used to elect someone, we could expect PEI's 27 MLAs to be elected by about 67,000 votes.
If PEI gave STV a chance, the benefits STV would not have to be proven through statistics.
It would only take a simple polling of citizens - are you satisfied with the result of the recent STV election?
If a majority of about 80 percent say they are happy, then that would prove STV effectiveness.
If only about half say they are happy, then STV had not produced a more fair result than the previous FPTP elections.
But if STV is given a chance, I expect a much larger proportion of voters to be happy - to see that their vote had been used to elect their choice or at least someone they preferred over the other candidates - than is happening today in FPTP elections.
(more info on PEI politics can be seen at
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What is the ultimate size of the multi-seat district?
The entire state is the largest possible constituency for the election of state legislators in the U.S.. Just as a province as a whole is the largest size possible for election of provincial legislators in Canada.
PEI is about the only province where this is possible, with 27 MLAs. Other provinces have many more MLAs, from Ontario's 124 MLAs to Newfoundland and Labrador's 40.
As the number of seats increase, so does proportionality but so also does the size of the physical ballot and the burden of counting votes. So the number of seats is set through a balance of the two opposing indices.
MM districts produce four benefits:
longer legislative tenure (SMD produced this as well)
less gerrymandering (SMD produced this as well)
more representative legislature*
multi-party system*
* Silva points out that the extent of these benefits depends on the number of members apportioned to each district and on the kind of electoral system used in the district. (p. 509)
Seats in the Provinces
NFLD 40 MLAs 7 MPs
PEI 27 MLAs 4 MPs
Nova Scotia 55 MLAs 11 MPs
NB 49 MLAs 10 MPs
Quebec 67 MLAs 78 MPs
Ontario 124 MLAs 121 MPs
Manitoba 57 MLAs 14 MPs
Sask 61 MLAs 14 MPs
Alberta 87 MLAs 34 MPs
BC 87 MLAs 42 MPs
total 654 MLAs 338 MPs
Can province-wide districts work?
As a precedent of how large a multi-seat district can be, we can look at New South Wales (Australia).
In its 2019 election of members of the legislative council, NSW used STV in one multi-member district to elect 21 members. 4.5M votes were cast in NSW in this election.
That number of votes is more than are cast in any province in Alberta.
The number of seats filled through STV in that one at-large district in NSW is more than are cast federally in six provinces. so there would be no hold-up to using STV in a province-wide district at least in those six provinces, if we accept that the 2019 at-large STV election was a success.
But the NSW election does not give us precedent to using STV in a province-wide election for provincial elections as there are no provinces where 21 or fewer seats are filled in provincial elections.
But elections in even the largest province, Ontario, could be theoretically held using just six districts. That is, if we were to part from the current belief in single-member representation.
ONTARIO
About half of Ontario's population is within the Greater Toronto Area, currently divided into 52 federal ridings, while the rest of the population is enclosed in the other 69 ridings.
And the provincial district structure is likely much the same.
So federally
GTA could be grouped into three districts of 14 seats each (quota would be about 7 percent)
the rest of the province:
6 of the largest ridings would remain single-member districts (the large size of a MM district making cross-district travel very arduous)*
all other ridings (63 of them) could be grouped into three districts. (Quota would be about 4 percent)
or say six districts of about 10 seats each (Quota would be about 9 percent).
The large ballots that would result from high District Magnitude (large number of open seats) would not be too daunting if candidates' names are arranged by party, and the burden imposed on voters voting under preferential voting would not be too heavy if voters had liberty to mark only as many back-up preferences as they desire.
If the same districts were used for both federal and provincial elections, or if one level moves to M districts before the other, if the MM districts were composed of a number of the units of the other, a natural relationship between members and voters and a local culture and network could emerge. Of all the Canadian provinces, this is only possible in Ontario where the number of provincial seats and federal seats are roughly the same. In all other provinces there are many more provincial members than federal members.
Under STV, despite large MM districts, the possibility for local representation could be assured by the knowledge that any locality or corner of the multi-seat riding would elect a local representative if the voters there marked their preferences consistently for local candidates and if they have quota. And elected members would be elected by votes within each district, with responsibility basically only to represent the residents of that district.
* Districts that remain as single-member districts could switch to Alternative Voting. Voters there would cast preferential votes same as voters in the other regions of the province, in order that voters everywhere use the same voting system.That way all voters across the province would cast preferential ballots - marking first preference and back-up preferences if voter desires. Having the same voting system in use across the province would simplify the broadcast of instructions to voters.
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Multi-member districts in our future?
Taking Manitoba as a project, how could fair representation be achieved through multiple-member districts?
WINNIPEG -- Under FPTP, in the last Manitoba provincial election (2019), there was considerable dis-proportional mis-representation.
A few multi-seat districts would easily cover the city and with a fair voting system, would produce representation much fairer than that produced in 2019.
Winnipeg
Overall Winnipeg (32 seats): 15 Cons 14 NDP 3 Lib
overall party vote percentages: Cons 37 percent NDP 36 percent Lib 19 percent
number of winners that won with majority of the district vote: 14
number of winners that won with minority of the district vote: 18
Winner's percentage of the vote (high and low): 62 p.c. (Point Douglas) and 38 p.c. (McPhillips)
Number of winner's votes (high and low ): 6075 (Robin) and 2536 (Burrows)
Effective votes by party: Cons 69,000 (67 percent of Cons votes)
NDP 51,000 (51 percent of NDP votes)
Liberal 13,000 (26 percent of Lib votes)
Overall effective votes (votes cast for candidates who were elected):
133,000 votes 48 percent of valid votes
Overall wasted votes (votes cast for candidates who were not elected):
142,000 votes 52 percent of valid votes
But PR would be produced if Winnipeg was divided into say two multi-seat districts:
one of 15 seats Quota would be about 7 percent
one of 17 seats Quota would be about 6 percent.
An odd number of seats in the district is preferred as it allows a party with a slight majority to have a majority of seats easily.
Under STV, about 80 percent or more of the voters in a district would see their vote actually used to elect someone. This is a much higher figure than FPTP. In Winnipeg less than half the voters saw their vote used to elect someone.
Although Winnipeg is a large city (by Canada standards), elected members could easily cross the city if it was one district and easily cover half the city.
Each district, even those covering about half the city, would still be smaller in geographic area than even the smallest rural district. And there would be multiple members to do the job, not just one as under FPTP.
The whole metropolitan area of Winnipeg is only 464 sq. kms. in size.
The average for provincial districts in Manitoba is 11,000 sq. kms.
Leaving out Winnipeg, pretty much all of Manitoba is divided into 25 districts, each represented by just one MLA. so each district outside of Winnipeg on average covers almost 26,000 sq. kms.
(Back in 1899 in the age of horse and buggy, 37 districts covered Manitoba outside of Winnipeg.
If there are large rural districts, which there are, it is partly due to the number of MLAs outside Winnipeg decreasing in number as Winnipeg took a larger portion of the MLAs elected each time.
The same holds true of Alberta. Fewer MLAs represent the area outside of the major cities today as compared to 1917, back when automobiles were made of tin and most roads were dirt.
1917 52 MLAs MLAs outside of Calgary and Edmonton
2019 41 MLAs outside of Calgary and Edmonton
We have more people and more money compared to 1899 or 1917, but only slightly larger number of MLAs overall and fewer MLAs for rural areas.
A basic fairness would be created by researching the largest number of seats for the rural portion of the province ever in the province's history and determining the number of voters in an average district (by diving the total rural pop today by that number of MLAs) and using this as a guide as to how many seats Winnipeg should get, with say an average district in Winnipeg having a third more voters than a rural district.
With Winnipeg using multi-seat districts, there would be flexibility in the number of members the city would have.
The districts could based on the city's corporate limits and on natural lines within the city, such as rivers.
With rural districts being stable, there too organic districts could be drawn. They could incorporate natural boundaries and geographic features.
The districts' boundaries would stay the same. Just the number of seats could change in subsequent re-distributions.
The total number of MLAs would change as population grows. But the shape and size of the districts would stay the same.
Grouping districts should be easily do-able within Winnipeg itself. Certainly the geographic size of new MM districts within Winnipeg should not be a problem.
At the time when rural districts are stabilized, it might be easy to also create multi-seat districts in rural regions. Grouping districts outside Winnipeg into MM districts may be difficult with the existing number of MLAs in the province (57).
Perhaps a small increase in the number of MLAs would ease this process. An increase in the overall number of elected members is sometimes par for the course when moving to a more fair electoral system. And such an increase could help when creating MM rural districts.
When New Zealand moved to MMP, the overall number of elected members was increased by 20 percent.
In Canada too such an increase may be considered a worthwhile trade-off for more fair and balanced representation.
That size of increase would be about 60 MPs in federal elections.
In Manitoba it would be an increase of 10 MLAs.
To balance urban and rural representation, 5 could be added to Winnipeg, where elections would be held in MM districts covering half or smaller portions of the city.
Five additional members could be added outside Manitoba.
We could take the ten rural districts with the largest populations. (Likely these would be the ones smallest in geographic size).
Adjoining neighbours could be paired and each pair (now a MM district) could be given an extra seat.
In the new 3-seat districts that would result, under STV any candidate who received 25 percent of the vote would be elected.
Only if a party had 75 percent of the votes would it take all the seats in a district.
If MM and single voting was brought in within Winnipeg and in ten populous districts outside Winnipeg, the election of representatives for more than half the population of the province would thus be held under PR. Under such a scheme, the voters that are currently represented by 42 of the province's 57 MLAs would elect their members through PR.
Under the scheme, those voters would be represented by 52 of the province's 67 MLAs.
And the depth and nature of that representation would be of a much higher quality than currently under FPTP.
Under such a PR scheme, Liberal and NDP voters outside Winnipeg who are now generally under-represented would see their views better represented in the Assembly than under the present FPTP.
Currently in Manitoba's rural districts, Conservative candidates are winning seats with barely more than half of the vote while as much as 45 percent of the voters get no representation at all. With 3-seat districts and STV used, two or more parties would be elected in many districts.
Brandon East and Brandon West are natural choices for paired districts.
In the 2019 election, Brandon was divided into those two districts and FPTP was used to fill the two seats. 7600 Conservative voters in those two districts took both seats, while 4000 NDP, 1400 Liberal and 700 Green voters got no representation at all.
Under STV, you would expect 80 percent of the votes to be used to elect someone. With Winnipeg's 270,000 votes and about 80,000 votes in the ten current districts outside Winnipeg that would be made into MM districts, we would have 350,000 voters out of the province's total of 479,000 (2019) electing under PR and 280,000 would see their vote used to elect someone.
In the 2019 FPTP election, in those same parts of the province only about 180,000 saw their vote used to elect someone.
But multi-member districts by themselves are no solution to dis-proportional misrepresentation.
The flexibility produced by having MM districts means that if evil is intended, officials can draw a border that best gerrymanders against the opposing party then apportion whatever number of seats the size of the population within warrants.
Small parties can take a seat or two under single-member districts when they might be totally shut out if large MM districts are used - if an unfair voting system is used.
But MM districts means that some balance is easily achieved - by merely restricting each voter to only casting one vote. X voting, the type of voting voters are used to, could be used in MM districts and would often produce mixed representation. It prevents one-party sweeps unless that party has a great proportion of the vote or opposing parties suffer from vote splitting (perhaps due to running more candidates than their vote portions warrant).
Even if that vote is not transferable, the casting of a single non-transferable vote in a MM district would often produce mixed, balanced representation.
STV uses transferable votes and is more dependable than SNTV.
The use of non-transferable votes in SNTV means that parties more popular within a district may get fewer (or no) seats than a less-popular party. The more popular party usually does get more seats but it is not to be depended on. But the use of SNTV in Vanuatu shows that MM districts do produce mixed representation. Mixed representation is more fair than one-party sweeps, the usual outcome of FPTP elections across multi-district regions - or even provinces - or even multi-province regions.
(Information on Vanuatu's 2020 SNTV election can be found at
The use of transferable votes (STV) will ensure more dependable and proportional results. The representation elected in each MM district will be dependably more proportional to the votes cast in the district than the result under SNTV. Parties with less votes than another party will not get more seats than that other party. At least that was the record in Edmonton and Calgary in the 30-plus years that STV was used (based on first count tallies).
Are transferable votes necessary?
The SNTV and STV systems in some cases elect exactly the same people - and seldom do STV final results vary much from the results that would be produced by SNTV.
The drawbacks of preferential voting that is used under STV is only a bit more burden put on voters - although voting along a party line is easy enough, but perhaps more significantly there is the psychological challenge of switching the voting system, where any change appears to be a hard-fought battle.
In conclusion,
Multi-seat districts are key to district-level PR voting systems.
Having more than one member in a district may seem revolutionary and risky - but I hope that the evidence presented in this essay helps the reader see that MM districts are not so out-there.
Tom Monto, Edmonton Jan 2022
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Later remarks:
Some seem to have idea that we inherited the FPTP system from Britain, and that was the way it was - the only way it was and now those who fight for Proportional representation are trying to bring in something that is totally new and totally un-tried.
But starting at the time of Confederation (or even earlier), multi-member districts, not the single-member districts commonly associated with FPTP, were in wide use. The two original Atlantic provinces in at 1867 - NB and NS - and PEI, when it joined in 1873, all elected most or all of their MLAs in multi-member districts, not in single-member districts.
BC MLAs were almost all elected in MM districts in its first prov election (1871). and Multi-member district(s) were used in every federal election prior to 1968, starting with the Confederation election of 1867. The last federal multi-member district was used in Canada in 1968. From 1867 to 1968, Canadian elections used one or more two-seat districts. These two-member ridings were: Ottawa 1867 to 1933 Halifax 1867 to 1968 (the last federal riding to have multiple members)
Victoria, BC 1871-1904 (1871 under the name Victoria District) Cape Breton, N.S. 1872-1903 Pictou, N.S.1872-1903 St. John City and County, N.B. 1872-1896 Hamilton, Ontario 1872-1903 In PEI: King's County 1873-1896; Queen's County 1873-1896; Prince County 1873-1896. So as you see, multi-members districts were quite common in 19th Century Canadian elections. And through most of the 1900s as well. And British elections too used MM districts back in those days.
For instance, they used Limited Voting to some degree, co-incidentally starting at the time of Canada's Confederation. The Limited Voting system "was applied in England to constituencies returning more than two members from 1867 to 1885." [Footnote states "the LV was applied to 13 constituencies each returning three or four members and included Glasgow, Birmingham and the City of London." (Phillips, Challenges to the Voting System, 1867-1974, (p. 17)available online: https://ir.lib.uwo.ca/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1860&context=digitizedtheses) British elections might also have used Block Voting in other districts or times as well. The dominance of FPTP, the idea that Canada and Britain always used it before and now pro-PR reformers are trying to bring in something completely new and never tried - like the myth that no suitable alternative exists - is a myth that has wide currency but is not based on truth. It seems those who do not know their history are doomed to repeat... doomed to repeatedly elect un-representative governments!
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