Edmonton Journal, June 4, 2024
"Edmontonians aren't pleased: poll" by Jackie Carmichael
Jackie Carmichael wrote that poll shows 43 percent of peole say they would vote for someone else other than our current mayor, and she says that "he would be hard pressed to win."
But actually in the last election when Mayor Sohi won, not 43 percent voted for someone else, but actually 55 percent voted for someone else.
He still won.
Why? Because you don't need majority of votes to win in our First Past The Post system.
FPTP is also known as Single-Member Plurality (SMP) - you just need plurality to win - plurality is more votes than any other candidate.
in 2021 Sohi was the most-popular candidate among those running for mayor. that is why he won.
He was not required to have support from majority of voters and he did not have that.
(It could be that he is actually more popular now than he was when he was elected. or might receive more votes in next year's city election than he received in 2021.
He only had 45 percent support last time, measured by votes cast.
And remember polls are wrong one time out of 20, and those who answered the poll may be different from who voted last time or who will vote next time, or the people who are polled might change their minds before the next election.)
It is possible he will be hard pressed to be elected but not because 43 percent of the people will vote for someone else
- unless that 43 percent of voters all vote for the same person.
And even then as long as he takes more than 43 percent, he will be re-elected, if he runs again.
The SMP system is flawed in that in a district the majority of votes may be cast for candidate who are not elected while a minority choice is elected.
This waste of voters in each district - sometimes as large as 70 or 80 percent of votes cast -- means that overall often more votes are ignored than the number that are used to elect someone.
And because candidates running in one ward are not compared against candidates running in another ward, there is no guarantee that the most-popular candidates across the city are elected.
In 2021 in Edmonton, one city councillor was elected with 4026 votes (Anne Stevenson) while in other wards as much as 5792 was not enough to be elected.
One councillor was elected with 16,252 votes. (Cartmell). If we had fair voting system and those 16,000 vote had been spread out over 4 candidates, they all would have been more popular than Anne Stevenson. That was a form of vote waste also.
if we had one city-wide district, and each voter had just one vote, all candidates would be compared to each other. If the 12 most-popular were elected, this alone would be more fair than our present system.
And each voter would have wide selection of candidates to chose from, would not be trapped in his or her little ward.
If we take this city-wide district and each voter having one vote, and add ranked transferable ballots, then we would have super fairness and equity - each winner would be elected by the same or very close to the same number of votes.
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