Robert Tyson, a leader of Canada's pro-rep movement, wrote in 1904 that
"The bane of pro-rep has been the complexities introduced by those who aim at an impossible and needless mathematical accuracy. In most actual STV elections the candidates who head the poll on the count of first choices are those ultimately elected...
Therefore the transfers are of secondary importance. The essential point is the use of the single vote and multiple-member districts...
The use of some plan of transfer is necessary as a safeguard.
But when transfer is a minor feature, why place so much stress on the particular method and introduce endless complications?
The common people object to submitting their ballots to a complicated system of counting that they cannot understand."
(Tyson, "Appendix" in Cridge, Proportional Representation (1904), p. 61-62)
At that time Tyson did not push a particular system, but in an article he wrote later, he said that a form of Limited Voting - the single non-transferable system, the so-called Japanese system - was crude but effective at providing mixed representation roughly proportional to a parties' standings in a district.
In that simple scheme, each voter casts a single non-transferable ballot in a multi-member district.
Limited Voting [a somewhat similar system] is where each voter casts fewer vote(s) than the number of open seats. (Grain Grower Guide, August 7, 1912, p. 10)
By the by, in almost all the actual STV elections in Alberta, one or two candidates did change from the first-count leaders as compared to the end result.
But transfers were not what produced most of the mixed, roughly-proportional representation elected in Edmonton elections.
This was seen as early as the first STV election of Edmonton MLAs. The representation elected in the 1926 Edmonton election was very different from the one-party sweep of Edmonton seats in 1921.
Most of this fairness was produced by the 1926 election's use of the single vote cast in a multi-member district. Only a couple of the leaders changed through vote transfers conducted during the vote count.)
Transfers only added one new party to the mix, while nixing an independent candidate. The Independent candidate was among the leaders in the First Count but did not receive many transfers. Labour candidate Lionel Gibbs accumulated transfers, passed the Independent's vote tally and hung on until the end to be elected.
Transfers also achieved better proportionality by taking one seat from the Liberals and giving it to a Conservative. The Conservative candidates together received about half again more First-Count votes than the Liberal candidates taken together. The transfers allowed that total party support to come together and to be seen in the elected members.
The front runners were 1 Conservative, 1 UFA, 2 Liberals and 1 Independent-Liberal.
The successful candidates in the end were 2 Conservatives, 1 UFA, 1 Liberal and 1 Labour.
It is time to bring STV back!
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