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Timeline of Montopedia blogs on Electoral Reform

  • Tom Monto
  • 15 hours ago
  • 7 min read

Montopedia blogs on Electoral Reform arranged in chronological order



City of Adelaide in the colony of South Australia Its first election saw the first use of a form of PR (guaranteed minority   (The young Catherine Helen Spence was a witness.)



1861 Australia: Catherine Helen Spence in a pamphlet A Plea for Pure Democracy she put forward a system of STV where votes would be



U.S. Civil War preventable through PR?  see 1869


Sir John Lubbock in his 1884 pamphlet Proportional Representation indicates that a U.S. government report of 1869 says fair voting co



Illinois's Cumulative Voting 1870 to 1980       Cumulative Voting is not PR and it is not STV BUT it does produce some semblance of minority representation that is not produced under



1871 W.R. Ware conducted early demonstration STV election, invented IRV, wrote Machinery of Politics    1871 W.R. Ware used STV to elect Harvard University overseers. than again in May 1872 he used STV to elect 12 overseers of the Harv



Charles Buckalew 1872 book Proportional representation; or, The representation of successive majorities in federal, state, municipal,..



Here is an excerpt from Ed Blake's "Aurora Speech" of 1874, where he talks of need for electoral reform. Edward Blake (1833-1912) was a

Canadian politician




1881

Henry Richmond Droop On Methods of Electing Representatives 1881 ( https://www.jstor.org/stable/2339223?origin=crossref ) why we vot



Proportional Representation A Practical Proposal (1884) A form of list PR was suggested by British reformer John Westlake, Q.C. He



1893

Sandford Fleming Rectification of the Parliament

Fleming's 1893 book is reproduced here in five parts:

keyword: (See my blog "list of Montopedia blogs concerning electoral reform" to find other blogs on this important subject.)



The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 1893  American Academy of Political and Social Scien


Catherine Helen Spence (1825-1910) was a leader in the electoral reform movement of Australia. Below is transcript of talk she gave in



Report of meeting on "Proportional representation," or effective voting, held at River House, Chelsea, on Tuesday, July 10th 1894





1897 Tasmania used STV for election of members of state chamber for cities of Hobart and Launceston. First use of STV (with both..



from OBSERVATIONS ON THE WORKING RESULTS OF THE HARE SYSTEM OF ELECTION IN TASMANIA. BY R. M. Johnston, F.L.S. [circa 1897] The chie



1898

Effective Voting - the Basis of Good Municipal Government . Proportional Representation Committee of Ontario Toronto. [1898] 31 pages


Effective Voting. THE Basis of Good Municipal Government. AN EXPOSITION OF THE PRINCIPLES AND PRACTICE OF PROPORTIONAL REPRESENTATION wa



1899 First Political and Social Conference, Buffalo (New York).   June 27th to July 4th (also sometimes called the National Political an


1900


Australia adopted adoption of STV in 1901 when a new Commonwealth-level Electoral Bill was up for debate. Apparently Nansen, Catherine



In early 1901, Eltweed Pomeroy reported on the 1899 Buffalo Conference and laid out plans for the 1901 Conference to be held at Detroit.



Frederick Desbartzch Monk , MP - Jacques Cartier (riding in Montreal), moved: That a Select Committee of this House be appointed to



Around 1914 many North American cities switched, or considered switching, to the Commission Plan or Commission-Manager Plan of civic..


The Edmonton Capital newspaper of Aug. 24, 1914 discussed what system of voting Edmonton would use if the City brought in the



It has an elected city council across 24 wards and a mayor elected city-wide, each elected using the first-past-the-post voting election


1917 Calgary was first city in Canada to adopt STV. STV in use until 1960, sporadically through 1960s, and then in general election


These stats are taken from Joseph P. Harris "Practical Workings of proportional representation in the U.S. and Canada" National Municipal...


-

See The Drive for PR in BC, 1917-1923 by Dennis Pilon, B.A. (History and Sociology) thesis, Simon Fraser University, 1996 see also...



1919 Grain Growers Guide published Charles Bowman's views on PR and the first Sligo city election conducted using STV  GGG (Dec. 10, 1919) published an article by  Charles A. Bowman, the editor of the Ottawa Citizen , on the recent Sligo election, the


Much info on the 1919 Sligo election in this publication of the Proportional Represention Society of Canada. The first municipal P.R..



[written July 22, 2021] July 18, 2021 was 100th anniversary of a government elected on promise of electoral reform and that governmen



THE "ALTERNATIVE VOTE" METHOD EXPLAINED .  BY RONALD Hooper.  (from Canadian Bar Review 1923) On February 19th, the Dominion House of Co..



THE SINGLE TRANSFERABLE VOTE   It is important also to note that the system of proportional representation adopted by all these American..



Edmonton City elections used STV from 1923 to 1927. Single Transferable Voting, a voter-driven candidate-based form of proportional...



1925 1925 Chile -- PR adopted because unlike previous Cumulative Voting,  list system introduced incentives for candidates of the same



The Imperiali quota is considerably smaller than even the Droop (which is smaller than the Hare quota). The Droop is the absolute



Understanding the Winnipeg STV provincial election -- understanding the vote transfers table in Wiki "1927 Manitoba election" The count table protraying the 1927 Winnipeg provincial election is flawed in that each count in the table does two purposes - for…



In 1924 when the UFA reformed the province's elecitons system, the UFA did not group constituencies outside the three largest cities. If..



The House of Commons  formed a special committee to investigate P.R. and electoral reform.   In the end, the Special Committe on..

Hooper



Some say many voters have trouble voting with preferntial ballots and that many votes are either exhausted or in some other way not used...



1952, 1955 Alberta elections the last to use PR


1981-

Honduras OLPR in use in 2013 16 MMDs,  DM ranged from 2 to 23; 2 districts ( Gracias a Dios* and Islas de la Bahía ),  with one..


1988

1988 is stark case where Mulroney did not take majority of votes cast but formed majority gov't and did change Canada in anti-labour way...





2000


2005 A referendum was held in the Canadian province of British Columbia on May 17, 2005, to determine whether or not to adopt the



18 percent elected the winner, 82 percent of the votes cast were disregarded in thsoe two cases in Canadian history 1944 Alberta Army



2018 -- Nepal used STV to elect National Assembly (national upper house) in indirect election. This change was due to passage of a new



In recent Fair Vote Canada panel discussion*, a speaker mentioned that in London's election, a Black woman was elected in the London..



The 2018 London Ontario election was the first in Canada to use ranked voting since 1971. But the arbitrary limit put on voters to mar



The 2018 London Ontario city election stands out as the first time ranked votes have been used in a Canadian government election since.



Block Voting sometimes elected mixed representation; sometimes it does not,. But even when it does, is it proportional? We can look a



It seems the 2018 BC referendum question was set by the Fraser Institute. It was unduly complicated. In 2005, 58 percent of the.


PEI Electoral reform referendum 2019 MMP versus FPTP MMP is combo of FPTP in single-member district and list PR for top-up seats in.



The 2024 UK election result is surprising and is dis-proportional. Labour took a massive majority government with only 34 percent of the



2025 Canadian election - one-seat ridings of Edmonton-Gateway and Edm-Southeast offer little leeway for voters (Millwoods Mosaic, April 2025


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History | Tom Monto Montopedia is a blog about the history, present, and future of Edmonton, Alberta. Run by Tom Monto, Edmonton historian. Fruits of my research, not complete enough to be included in a book, and other works.

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