Edmonton, the capital city of Alberta, used STV in city elections for a short time in the early 1900s. Despite the short-ness of its use, it proved itself able to produce mixed roughly proportional city councils.
Edmonton used STV from 1923 to 1927 - five elections. And in each election it produced mixed roughly proportional results that reflected most of the votes cast.
The city's elections were complicated by the fact that the southside was guaranteed two seats on council. Party labels were used - the business-oriented Citizens Committee and Labour Party - but STV elections do not use parties to determine successful candidates. Voters vote for individual candidates, and the vote tally of each candidate is compared to a "quota" and to the other candidates' tallies to determine the result. The election of multiple winners in a district ensure that most of the votes cast are represented by the successful candidates, if not through first preference then at least someone that the voter preferred over the others.
STV uses transferable preferential ballots. And some voters saw their first preference elected and some saw just their second choice elected, and some saw both elected. Others - less than 30 percent of the voters cast - elected none.
In 1923, 70 percent of the first-preference preferences marked on the ballots went to candidates who were elected in the end.
Candidates of two parties were elected. The business slate, the Citizens League, took the most seats but Labour did well also.
Within each slate the most popular individual candidates were elected.
Two candidates had quota on the first count and were immediately declared elected. (These were Labour's East and CC's Bury.)
Findlay achieved quota on the 2nd count, so that seat was filled early as well. One thousand votes that were marked for East as first preference and Findlay as second preference had both their first choice and their second preferences elected.
At the end of the 2nd Count, three empty seats remained. All five southside candidates were still standing and there were six northside candidates also still in running. At least two southside candidates would be elected to two-year terms.
The counting of the vote would continue until:
- the three seats were filled through three getting quota, two of them being southsiders,
- there being only two southsiders and one northsider left standing (all of whom would be declared elected even without achieving quota), or
- a northsider achieving quota, and there only being two southside candidates left standing to take the guaranteed seats. (The number of remaining northside candidates remaining would be immaterial as they could not be elected. However any votes that unsuccessful candidates possessed at the end would be ones that would not be used to elect anyone so would be counted as wasted.), or
- a southsider achieving quota and sometime later there being just one northsider and one southsider left standing, or
- a southsider achieving quota and eventually there being just two northsiders and one southsider left standing. The least-popular northsider would be eliminated, leaving the two remaining candidates to take seats.
It took 10 counts for Rea, a northside candidate, to achieve quota. (Thus the third option listed above was the one that happened.)
10 counts may seem like a lot of work, but these counts involved relatively few votes. the 3rd Count saw transfer of only 265 votes, for example.
Rea, one of the successful candidates, thus aggregated another 500 votes.
After Rea's election, there were only two seats left empty and these had to go to southside candidates.
Southsiders James Douglas (a former MP) and Joseph Duggan were declared elected to fill the two southside seats.
Rendall and Thomas Ducey (Edmonton baseball's man) had many votes in the first count but not quota and were not elected in the end. Five others, two from the southside, also were not elected.
The six successful candidates had received 8345 votes in the First Count so even without vote transfers the result showed a high proportion of the votes cast were used effectively to elect a councillor. East did not retain all of his votes. Some of East's votes went to Findlay; some went to other candidates who would eventually be declared elected; and some to those who would be eliminated. At the end, 8345 of the 12,000 voters who cast votes could look at the successful candidates and be happy about the result - the voter's first choice was elected.
Many voters were satisfied when their first choice, East, was elected.
A thousand voters could relish in the success of both East and Findlay. Findlay was the second choice of a thousand voters who had chosen East as the first choice. And then some of those votes were transferred on to Rea, Douglas and Duggan to help in the election of those. These voters - an unknown number - at this point in time were happy that their third choice was elected as well.
Of course each vote could only be used once. But the voter who cast his first choice for East, his second for Findlay, and later choices for Rea, Douglas and/or Duggan must have been well pleased with the overall election result.
Many others who voted for Bury as the first choice had a similar experience. If they had marked any of Findlay, Rea, Douglas and Duggan, and even East, as their secondary preferences, they could see those choices elected as well. But the vote itself could only be counted for one of them. If we add Findlay's vote total in the 2nd Count and Rea's 500-vote rise by the 10th Count (when he achieved quota), the number of votes received by the successful candidates exceeded 8000. four quotas 4 X 1692 = 6768 vote tallies of Douglas = 928* votes tallies of Duggan= 563* Total: 8259 * These totals are first-preference votes. By the time these two were elected in the 10th Count, Douglas and Duggan had aggregated even more votes. (But the number of votes they had cannot be known due to the official vote count chart being lost at this late year.)
So Edmonton's 1923 city election showed the fairness that STV could provide, that STV could ensure that only a small fraction of votes cast would be wasted, that votes cast by most of the voters would be used to elect someone.
The next four elections did the same fine job as well. STV would finally be discarded by voters but not because it was un-workable, nor because it was ineffective at producing balanced city councils that reflected votes cast by most city voters.
An upcoming blog will look at why in fact Edmonton's municipal STV was discarded.
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eiSome sources say that spoiled ballots were a problem in Edmonton's city elections but the benefits of STV far out-weighed the problem of spoiled ballots.
The number of spoiled votes was higher than any previous election but its exact number is unclear. It seems though that their presence did not have an impact on the fairness of the election. The number of spoiled votes varied from the mayoral and the aldermanic contests.
At least 1200 were spoiled in the aldermanic contest, where the number of candidates was larger than the mayoral contest. Some of the spoiled votes were ballots improperly filled out (say with an X instead of a number showing ranking), but some were declared spoiled for contests where the pertinent part of the ballot was simply left blank, such as no first-choice preference being marked for mayor or no first-choice preference was marked for alderman.
The number of spoiled ballots in 1923 was larger than any previous city election but the final result meant that only 3493 voters (out of 13,000) did not see their first choice elected. (Edmonton Bulletin, Dec. 12, 1923, p. 1)
By comparison, in Edmonton's 2017 city election, held using First Past The Post, more than half the voters did not see their choice elected.
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