To my mind the UFA brought in ranked voting across the province, the mixed STV/AV system, out of fairness, not for self-interest, and later the STV/AV system was abolished not to bring in fairness but to secure partisan advantage for the Social Credit government that had come into power by then.
The UFA is sometimes accused of bringing in STV/AV out of self-interest but a different recent blog shows the contrary evidence and that the UFA government did not get any benefit from AV.
The UFA got no special advantage from STV/AV
I grant that there was a difference between AV in rural districts and STV in the cities. But UFA did not get any benefit from AV nor did it put disadvantage on the opposition in the cities through bringing in STV. In fact the UFA ran only one candidate in Edmonton in 1926 and 1930 despite the five seats there and did not not run a candidate at all in Calgary so did not win any great number of seats from STV in the cities.
The ability of STV/AV to reflect changed voting behaviour was shown to striking effect in 1935 when the governing UFA lost all its seats and the just-born Social Credit party movement took a large majority of the seats. The lack of proportionality produced by AV outside the cities is shown by the fact the UFA with 11 percent of the vote did not win one seat.
But AV did not do badly in comparison to FPTP. The Alberta Party received about the same percentage of the vote in Alberta's 2019 FPTP election as the UFA did in 1935, and it too received no seats. (So AV's lack of proportionality should not be considered as due cause for its replacement by an equally-flawed FPTP voting system.)
The fairness of AV is shown by the fact that in each district outside the cities the winning candidate won by getting a majority of the vote in the first count or accumulating a majority through vote transfers. It just happened that voters were heavily in favour of the promises made by William Aberhart and other SC wanna-be politicians. And the 1935 election result showed that strong support.
In the cities, where STV was in use, there was also strong support for SC and there too SC candidates did well. It might have been hoped that UFA MLA Lymburn, running for re-election in Edmonton, would get a seat through STV's much-vaunted ability to produce minority representation but the remaining UFA vote in Edmonton was too meagre even to win one seat for the party.
Cause of the end of STV/AV can be easily laid to the Social Credit government's self-interest in wanting to take more than its fair share of seats in Calgary and Edmonton in particular and also to take more rural seats than it already was getting.
(Another reason can be found in the fact that by then Alberta was the only province not using FPTP (aside from BC which used a non-proportional mixture of FPTP and Block Voting). So if you want to have a more innocent justification, it is that the government did not want to stand out that way.)
In the next election after the return to FPTP, the SC government did take all but one seats in the cities, far more than its due share. And that obviously was its intent when it had made the change from STV in the cities.
The SC government also abolished AV outside the cities and forced a change back to Single-Member Plurality (FPTP) there as well. Sure, AV had been disproportional but was no more so than FPTP was known to be. So the shift was not made out of an attempt to get fairness.
The "other side" theory
Some have the idea that the UFA benefited from STV/AV and the "other side" then, when it finally struggled into power, used the opportunity to undo the on-going wrong.
But I don't see that there is "another side" that abolished it, for one thing. By 1955 the UFA had dropped out from direct politics and was no longer running candidates in elections. The SC were the most popular party in the rural areas and were also very popular in the cities as well. With the 1955 election, the SC government had taken power six times under STV/AV, each time with secure majority governments. The party that abolished STV/AV had been doing just fine under it.
Due to STV's fairness, no party had been suffering disadvantage from STV in the cities. Parties received the number of seats that their vote tally in the cities warranted. (But any party not able to assemble quota did not win a seat - as the CCF found in 1955. But that was only a fair result - even if it was a hard reality to swallow.)
If there was anyone suffering from Alternative Voting used outside the cities, it was the Liberals and Conservatives. And their fortunes did not improve with the change to FPTP.
After the change to FPTP, the number of opposition (non-SC) MLAs elected across the province decreased from 24 elected in 1955 to only four elected in 1959. The SC party had increased its popularity - from 46-percent overall support in 1955 to 56-percent overall support in 1959 - but even that increased support did not make it due the 94 percent of the seats that was now taking.
So definitely the change away from STV/AV did not result in addressing any historic dis-proportionality suffered by those parties.
Conservatives
In 1952, the Conservatives/Progressive-Conservatives took one seat in Edmonton, one in Calgary. It did not even run any candidates outside the cities so we cannot know anything of its voting strength outside the cities due to this.
In 1955, the Conservative party ran 13 candidates outside the cities and elected only one (in Red Deer), to sit alongside its one Edmonton and one Calgary member. A Conservative candidate was the second-most popular candidate in two districts and the third-most-popular in three districts but had won in none of those districts.
Liberals
In 1952, Liberals took 67,000 votes in the province including the cities. This was 22 percent of the vote but the party took only three seats. The three seats were all won under the fair STV system - one in Calgary and two in Edmonton. The Liberal party won no seats outside the cities, where AV was used. In 30 rural districts Liberals received the second-most number of votes but won none of the seats there.
In 1955, The Liberal party increased its vote tally and its seat count. Its 31 percent of the vote increased its seat count to 15. This was an increase in both the cities and outside the cities. It took two seats in Calgary and three in Edmonton, and 10 in rural areas.
Four of the wins outside the cities were by an initially-low-ranking SC candidate accumulating enough votes through vote transfers to take the lead - and the majority of district votes required to win under AV.
SC annoyed
The four turn-overs were annoying to the SC government, because the four initially-leading candidates thus thwarted belonged to the SC party. It was cause of annoyance to the government but not a sign of AV's non-proportionality. It could have been merely cause for slight annoyance and not for any replacement - the SC government still took 31 of the 48 rural seats. And replacing AV with FPTP did not do anything to create fairness.
In 1955 the SC government was winning most of the rural seats - and would go on to win most seats under FPTP.
In 1959, the SC government won even more rural seats under FPTP, as well as winning almost all the city seats. In both cases it won far more than its due share, and likely more than it would have won if STV/AV had been preserved.
Naked partisan self-interest shown by the SC government
So I would say the change from STV/AV to FPTP was not due to unbalance in dis-proportionality, as some say, but merely to naked partisan self-interest of the government.
Thanks for reading.
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