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Tom Monto

What are Alberta's four main parties?

Updated: Sep 19, 2020

The answer to this question is asked on google and answered wrong.


There were in the last election really only three main parties:

United Conservative Party

NDP

Alberta Party.


The Alberta Party despite getting 10 percent of the vote, and thus proportionally due 8-9 seats, did not receive any seats.


The UCP and NDP are the only parties represented in the legislature.


Despite a wide range of sentiment among voters, the UCP and NDP together received 88 percent of the vote. This concentration of votes seems to be product of the two-party straitjacket forced on voters by the FPTP system. Any voter not given to the leading candidate in each district is ignored and thrown in the wastebasket.


As most voters do not want their vote ignored, they pick one of the two candidates running in their district, NDP or Conservative, as their good-enough choice.


Some call it strategic voting; some call it misrepresentation; some call it the faulty result of a warped system.


Did the whole 88 percent of the voters believe that one or the other of these two parties were the best possible? I doubt it. But they did believe that the one they supported was good enough, a trade-off balanced off against placing their vote in the way they wanted to deep inside but feared it would be wasted if they did vote as they truly wanted to.


And even with such mass strategic voting, many votes were wasted in each district. See 2015 election blog for more information.


Thanks for reading.

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