Alberta's provincial election occurred on 23 April 2012. The polls had predicted a tight race with the ultra right-wing Wildrose party winning a narrow majority over the right-wing Progressive Conservative (PC) party which had been in power for 41 consecutive years. The polls turned out to be wrong as the PCs captured 61 of 87 seats in the provincial legislature with 44% of the vote. The Wildrose were second with 17 seats and 34% of the vote. The Liberals (five seats, 10% vote) and the New Democratic Party (NDP, 4 seats, 10% vote) took the remaining seats.
It may appear like the PCs won in a near landslide though they only had a minority of the votes but how close were the Wildrose to forming the government? A visit to Elections Alberta to download the results and the electoral districts (ED) shapefile leads to some interesting answers.
As the map above shows, the Wildrose dominated southern Alberta but they had narrow loses to the PCs in a number of other EDs. The red EDs are where the Wildrose lost to the PCs by less than 5%. That means, if one in 40 of all the voters in that ED was a PC voter who decided to vote Wildrose instead, those nine EDs would have gone to the Wildrose. Together, the red and yellow EDs represent where the PCs would have lost if just one in 20 voters selected Wildrose instead of PC. There are 24 red and yellow EDs so if just five percent of the electorate in just those 24 EDs switched their vote, the PCs go down five percent, the Wildrose up five percent and those EDs fall to the Wildrose. That makes the results of the election a Wildrose minority with 41 seats to 37 for the PCs.
Should an election be able to change so much on what appears to be such a small change in voting? Proportional representation in Alberta would have brought a PC minority with 38 seats to 30 for the Wildrose, nine each for the Liberals and NDP and a single seat for the Alberta Party. A 10% swing between PCs and Wildrose in just a third of the EDs would not have changed a near landslide into a minority.
Proportional representation would also have allowed many voters on the left to avoid strategic voting. In the run-up to the election, there was lots of talk about how to block the Wildrose and their regressive policies from becoming reality. It’s impossible to know the true support of the PCs in Alberta due to strategic voting and the apathy in the first-past-the-post system where people don’t vote because the outcome of their ED is nearly guaranteed. I had hoped the final polls before the election would show the intentions of many Liberal and NDP voters who then switched to the strategic vote for the PCs at the ballot box. The last polls don’t show this as Liberal and NDP support is nearly the same as in the election. The polls only indicate that borderline Wildrose supporters had second thoughts about making a deal with the dev… er… Danielle Smith and went back to the PCs.
