By Tom Monto (first written for the Millwoods Mosaic, November 2022 edition)
Premier Danielle Smith says she is considering ballots in city elections in Edmonton and Calgary showing party labels next to candidates' names. It would bring a degree of clarity to our elections that is currently lacking but would not address the present injustices we see. In fact having party labels may actually make the injustices more apparent. I am speaking of how a minority of voters can have representation while the majority are un-represented. 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 but suffered from vote splitting, that is assuming their voters would have joined together if given a chance. Did party labels produce more fair result? I say no. We see minority rule also in Edmonton's last city election. The mayor himself was elected with less than half the votes cast in the city. He may have been elected under a system where a majority is required to win but we'll never know. And 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 answer 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 votes could mark back-up preferences. But for most of the districts we can't know that the elected member was in fact the choice of most of the voters in their 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 without party labels. But we would likely get a different answer from his opponents who altogether had more vote than Sohi but did not get the mayor's chair. Some might think there is no other way to do it. But there are actually election systems that require a candidate to have a majority of votes to be elected. Yes, We see one in action this autumn - the Senate race in Georgia (U.S.A.) is being held with a two-round runoff system. But better to my mind is a system where the runoff is held immediately and without another election being held. That system is so-called Instant-Runoff Voting. it is not as instant as instant rice but it is quicker than it 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 can be represented in a district. and that is 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 Labour got four seats, and the business slate most of the rest time after time 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 in each election. Then Edmonton dropped STV but retained multi-member wards and party labels. Party labels were retained until the 1980s; multi-seat wards were retained until 2010. With two seats per ward, each voter was able to cast two votes, and often both members were likely elected by the same group, which might make up 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 represented across the city. 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 are ignored. That is what happened in 2021. Would party labels help in a city like Red Deer where they don't have wards but elect their member 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 simply make what happens easier to see. But each voter casting eight votes means that the proportion of satisfied voters will still be murky. We don't know if one party takes all the seats because the ballots do not show party labels. But the largest group could take all the seats. 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 - one-eighth of the votes to count - but also mean that balance is produced, that all substantial groups in the city are represented. And only if more than group is represented will we see the majority of votes in a district being represented in dependable fashion. And meantime Edmonton should switch to three or four wards covering the whole city, each electing three or more members, and should leave each voter with just one vote just as he or she has now. So I would tell Premier Smith that we could use party labels, but really what we need is effective voting - single voting in districts where three or more members are elected. ============
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