Colin Walmsley in otherwise excellent article
https://www.fairvote.ca/2021/09/28/blame-first-past-the-post-for-canadas-growing-rural-urban-divide/
wrote:
"Millions of rural Canadians regularly vote for progressive parties, just like millions of urban Canadians vote for conservative ones.
First-past-the-post obscures this fact by giving one politician in each riding 100 per cent of the power with a simple plurality of the vote, denying any representation to minority voices. A proportional voting system would instead showcase the diversity of opinions across Canada by allowing the election of both conservative and progressive voices in every region, urban and rural."
This statement actually gives our First Past The Post single-winner election system too much credit.
Often the successful candidate has received only a minority of the votes - just having more votes than any other candidate is enough to be elected. So often the only voice elected is a minority voice, while the majority of votes (spread among variety of groups) are ignored.
An election system with multi-members elected in each district but each voter casting just one vote would produce mixed representation in each district. This would allow more groups to be represented and would stop the artificial one-party sweeps that now falsely make it look like the voters in a city or province just hold one opinion.
And meanwhile the large proportion of ignored votes discourages voter turn-out. Only 32 percent of city voters bothered to count in 2017 - and this is based on the eligible electors said to be 620,000. Edmonton has 668,000 eligible votes in provincial elections, where the criterion to be a voter is almost identical.
Only 195,000 voters bothered to vote in the 2017 Edmonton city election while 408,000 voted in the city in the 2019 provincial election. The lack of political party labels in the city election could have accounted for the fact that more stayed at home than went out to vote.
The large proportion of ignored votes - the feeling that your vote is not important - also may have contributed to the high rate of stay-at-homes.
In the 2017 election only 86,000 votes went to elect a councillor while 105,000 votes in these elections were ignored. This was bad but elections have been very similar to that since we switched to single-winner aldermanic elections.
As of today there have been three city elections since Edmonton switched to single-member wards. And in each election, more concillors were elected by a minority of voters in their wards than were elected by the majority of voters in their wards.
Voters may not have noticed the overall effect but more saw that their preferred candidate was not elected than saw their preferred candidate elected. So the election result must have been discouraging for more voters than the number encouraged by the result.
2017 stands out that it was the first election where fewer votes in total were used to elect someone than the number that were ignored.
This dis-proportionality was not always so bad but for many elections it has been steadily worsening.
in 2010 city election, although the successful mayoral candidate was elected with majority of votes, the ward elections saw many voters ignored. 105,000 voted for the successful aldermanic candidates; 90,000 voted for the unsuccessful aldermanic candidates. One ward saw just two candidates compete so the winner there was certain to take a majority of the votes. But in total, seven of the city's 12 councillors were elected with just minority of votes in the ward. One successful candidate in Ward 3 won just 28 percent of the votes cast in the ward.
in 2013, although again the mayor was elected with majority of votes cast, in the ward elections almost as many votes cast were ignored as were used to elect someone.
In 2013, 114,000 votes went to successful aldermanic candidates and 92,000 to unsuccessful aldermanic candidates. One ward saw just two candidates compete so the winner there was certain to take a majority of the votes. But in total, seven of the city's 12 councillors were elected with just a minority of votes in the ward. The successful candidates in Wards 2 and 5 won just 29 percent of the votes cast in their respective wards.
As mentioned, the relationship of effective to ineffective votes was reversed in 2017, when more voters voted for unsuccessful candidates than voted for successful ones.
Perhaps being discouraged by the lack of relationship between votes cast and the election results, many stayed home in 2013.Turn-out was only 35 percent, so again two-thirds of eligible voters stayed home.
For each one that voted, two stayed home.
214,000 voted in 2013.
And in 2017 turn-out dropped further. Only 32 percent voted. In total 195,000 votes were cast.
Of these, just 86,000 were used to elect the city council.
And it could be that these 86,000 votes were all of one mindset, one single group spread across the 12 wards may have filled all the seats, leaving no representation for any other voting block. The minority elections in the individual wards can combine to produce a council that only represents a minority of the voters overall
Meanwhile, under the simple PR system of Single Transferable Voting, the proportion of effective votes (votes actually used to elect someone) is generally around 80 percent. Only 20 percent are ignored.
STV was actually used in Edmonton city elections at one time and was used to elect Edmonton MLAs for 30 years so we know that it works.
STV uses multi-member districts so under STV Edmonton would be converted into two multi-member wards, electing say five councillors in one district and seven in another. One district could be the city core and he other the suburbs.
Each voter would cast just one vote. STV uses ranked votes but voters could mark just their most-preferred candidate and not mark any back-up preferences if they chose. So no additional work would be required than under the present system.
When the first preferences are counted (in the "First Count"), already the front-runners (the most popular candidates) would be of a variety of voting blocks. No one voting block could take all the front runners. If they were all elected (as sometimes happens) there would be mixed representation elected. More than one viewpoint would be represented on council - which does not happen dependably in the single-winner election system we use now.
But to ensure as many votes are used to elect some on as possible, votes found to be placed on unpopular candidates unable to be elected are transferred according to back-up preferences marked by voters, if any.
As well, if a candidate is very popular and receives more votes than required to be elected, the surplus votes are transferred to ensure that the final result is as proportional as possible.
When votes are transferred, they move from the one most preferred by the voter to someone else but the recipient is still someone whom the voter prefers over someone else. (There are no back-up preferences used in single-winner elections and many - sometimes most - voters are ignored in the end under that system.)
Due to these transfers and to the Single Voting in multi-member districts, in the end about 80 percent of the voters will find that their vote was used to elect someone. The resulting city council will be of wide and diverse character, representing a large proportion of the city voters. No one voting block - say Business or Labour, Left or Right - will take all the seats.
That is how it should be.
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