I sent this letter to Red Deer Advocate in May 2021.
if it was published, I did not hear about it.
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Tom Monto
May 6, 2021
Red Deer Advocate letter to editor
Single Voting is answer to Red Deer’s election woes
Red Deer city elections recently have suffered from low voter turnout and many councillors have been elected by a minority of voters that did participate. But a simple modification could produce a much more democratic result and likely lead to larger voter turnout.
This modification is not the change to wards that was voted down in 2013, but instead a change to allow each voter to cast just one vote instead of the eight possible in the present councillor elections.
Such a system would retain the at-large system where multiple seats are filled in a single contest. This has real benefits. Red Deer voters have the right to pick among a wide range of candidates, for example. And if they wanted, voters in one section of the city could concentrate their votes on candidates who live in that one section, so local representation could be achieved, even under at-large elections. The fact that local representation is not achieved is likely caused more by each voter’s multiple votes than by at-large elections.
The at-large system avoids the need to divide voters into separate geographical groups so eliminates complicated drawing of ward boundaries, and dissatisfaction caused by gerrymandering, real or perceived. Winner-take-all First Past The Post elections are known to waste 40 to 65 percent of the votes cast in a district, whether in federal, provincial or city elections.
Each Red Deer voter is currently able to cast up to eight votes for council candidates. This means about a hundred thousand more votes have to be counted than is strictly necessary.
It also means that a single voting block can take all the seats, leaving no representation to other groups.
I can’t say that that is happening, but examination of vote tallies for the 2019 election does show that the most-popular candidate received votes from 64 percent of the 19,000 voters who participated in the election and the second-most-popular candidate received votes from barely more than half the voters. But the other six successful candidates received support from only a minority of voters, with the least-popular successful candidate receiving support from fewer than a third of the voters. Six of the eight councillors were elected by support of less than half the voters. It is possible the six were elected by only one small group, hardly a democratic situation.
Meanwhile, 55 percent of the votes cast went to successful candidates while 45 percent were not used to elect anyone. In Edmonton elections, where wards are used, an even larger proportion of votes were wasted, so wards are no fix to this.
But a combination of Single Voting as used in Edmonton with Red Deer’s multi-seat contest would create a form of Limited Voting. Limited Voting was once used to elect Toronto MLAs in the late 1800s. Mixed roughly-proportional representation was produced where no one group was able to take all the seats. The same would be sure to happen today if such a system was established.
A more widely known alternative is Single Transferable Voting, a form of city-level proportional representation. This was used successfully for many years in Calgary city elections and for a shorter period in Edmonton city elections. It is currently forbidden under provincial law. But Single Voting, with each voter casting just one non-transferable vote, would produce a similar effect. As far as fairness and transparency goes, it would be a major improvement over today’s Block Voting used in Red Deer.
Perhaps in the upcoming election this plebiscite question could be asked:
Do you want to retain the at-large system but have each voter only cast one vote?
Yes, I want Single Voting where no one group can take all the seats and each large group can elect a councillor.
No, I want to continue Block Voting where one group can take all the seats.
Tom Monto
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Thanks for reading it here anyway.
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