November 2022:
Premier Danielle Smith says she is considering switching to having ballots in city elections show party labels next to candidates' names. Such a change would bring a clarity to our elections that is currently lacking, but it would not address the basic injustices. In fact having party labels may make the injustices more apparent.
I am speaking of how in many elections a minority of voters get representation while the majority of voters are unrepresented.
We see this in Smith's own cabinet. Four of her cabinet ministers were elected with less than half the votes in their district. The other parties - NDP, Alberta Party and Liberal - took a majority of the vote in the district but suffered from vote splitting and were shut out.
We see minority rule also in Edmonton's last city election. Nine of our 12 city councillors were elected with just a minority of the votes in their wards.
If we ask voters "did your vote help elect anyone in the last city election?", more will answer no than those who can say yes. Less than half the votes cast elected the members of our present city council.
The elected member might have had the support of more than that if voters could mark back-up preferences. But for these districts we can't know that the elected member was in fact the choice of most of the voters in the district.
And that means our representative democracy is not proven to be actually that representative.
Mayor Sohi was quoted as saying the current system works well. But we would likely get a different answer from his opponents who altogether received more votes but none of whom won the mayor's chair.
Some think there is no other way to conduct elections. But actually there are election systems that require a candidate to have at least a bare majority of votes to be elected. And other systems that produce mixed representation in an election contest so that a high proportion of voters see themselves reflected in one or more of the members elected.
We see one such system in action this autumn. The Senate race in Georgia (U.S.A.) is being held with a two-round runoff system, where the successful candidate will take a majority of votes.
Another system holds the runoff immediately and without another election being held. That system is the so-called Instant-Runoff Voting. It is not as instant as instant rice but it is quicker than the vote count process would be otherwise.
Edmonton does not need IRV. Instead it needs multi-member districts and each voter casting just one vote. Electing more than one member in each ward is the only way the diversity of sentiment in a district can be represented. And that is the only way to get Proportional Representation or Effective Voting.
Edmonton used such a system in city elections in the 1920s. Party labels were used and we can easily see that under the system Labour got four seats, and the business slate got most of the other six seats time after time. The results were very dependable - and fair.
Edmonton also used Single Transferable Voting to elect its MLAs from the 1920s to the 1950s. In each election, three or four parties were represented, and about 80 percent of voters had the satisfaction of seeing their vote used to elect someone each time.
In 1929 Edmonton dropped STV but retained multi-member wards and party labels.
Party labels were retained until the 1980s. They showed the unfairness of the election results.
With two or three seats per ward, each voter could cast multiple votes. Often the members in the ward were elected by the same group, which might have been less than half of the people voting.
By 2013 Edmonton had switched to one-seat wards with equally unfair results.
Adding party labels to Edmonton's existing single-seat districts will make it clearer that the Conservatives in a district are not represented and the NDP voters are, or visa versa, or that only Conservatives are represented all across the city or only NDP-ers are.
But party labels will not do anything about the basic problem of single-winner elections. Under the single-winner system more than half the votes cast in the city in 2021 were ignored.
Would party labels help in a city like Red Deer where city councillors are elected in one at-large district? In Red Deer, each voter has eight votes for city council and the largest group can take all the seats. Party labels will show the party balance in city hall. But each voter casting eight votes means that the proportion of satisfied voters will still be murky. The largest voting block could take all the seats – and likely does.
Simply having party labels will not make the results more balanced.
Red Deer should keep its at-large district but give each voter only one vote. That will ease the vote counting. There would be a much smaller number of votes to count. It would also mean that balance is produced. Only if more than one group is represented will we see the majority of voters in a district being represented in a dependable fashion.
And meantime Edmonton should switch to two or three wards covering the whole city, each electing 4 to 6 members each. And it should leave each voter with just the one vote, the same as he or she now has.
So I would tell Premier Smith that we could switch to using party labels. But really what we need in the election of city councillors is effective voting. Each voter should have a single vote and each election contest should elect four or more councillors in a ward or all of a city’s councillors should be elected city-wide. That is what we really need.
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originally published in Millwoods Mosaic Nov 2022
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