2013 plebiscite
Do you want the city of Red Deer divided into wards?
No, I want to keep voting for Council candidates for the whole city, not just the area where I live. 13,315 votes
Yes, I want to be able to vote for the Council candidates who run in the area I live in (my ward). 5,240 votes
The change to ward elections was voted down.
The last response, to be accurate, should have been worded:
Yes, I want to be able to vote only for the Council candidates who run in the area I live in (my ward).
Because even under the at-large system, a voter can choose to give his or her votes (up to maximum of eight) only to candidates who live in the section of the city that the voter lives in.
A better question would be:
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 Multiple Voting where one group can take all the seats.
It seems clear what the answer should be...
Under Red Deer's present at-large Block Voting, 19,000 voters participated in the election.
This was a thousand fewer than had voted in 2013.
This was low turnout --- barely more than 25 percent of eligible electors.
As well, most of the successful candidates did not have support of a majority of voters that did participate.
The most-popular candidate, Michael Dawe, received support of 64 percent of the voters, the second-most, Tanya Handley, received support from barely than half of the voters.
The other six successful candidate received support from only a minority of voters, with the least-popular successful candidate, Vesna Hingham, receiving support from fewer than a third of the voters.
It is unknown how many of the eight successful candidates received most of their support from a single large voting block, voters' ability to cast multiple votes means that there could be massive overlap - that a single group could fill all the seats.
There is great uncertainty under the Block Voting scheme with voters able to cast anything from one to eight votes.
As few as 5,000 perhaps did not use their entire eight votes.
While perhaps every voter cast no more than seven votes each. This though is unlikely.
There were 32,000 un-cast votes.
Some of the polls showed the number un-cast votes was equivalent to a third or a fifth of the votes cast.
A much more straightforward system is one in which each voter casts just one vote but where voters and candidates and democracy as a whole get the benefit of multiple-member districts.
There have been many instances of Single Voting in Canadian history.
Limited Voting in which voters cast fewer votes than the number of seats being contested, votes that are non-transferable, was used to elect Toronto MLAs in 1886 and 1890.
Transferable preferential votes were cast in Alberta provincial elections in Edmonton, Calgary and Winnipeg.
But in three of these STV elections, vote transfers made no difference to the ranking of candidates - these can be taken as practical instances of SNTV, showing the fine results of even a basic Single Voting system that does not use transferable votes.
Under the current Alberta provincial legislation, cities cannot use transferable votes but in my opinion Single Voting is permitted. Voters can cast single votes, districts can contain more than one seat - all that is done now even if separately. Single Voting is where these two come together in combination. Surely the combination cannot be illegal, especially as it is proven to be in line with normal democratic aspirations.
Thanks for reading.
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