A reality based independent journal of observation & analysis, serving the Flathead Valley & Montana since 2006. © James Conner.
Election administration. Election administration in Alberta is nonpartisan, with an appointed Chief Electoral Officer whose job is to “administer open, fair, and impartial elections.” Contrast that with our system of selecting election administrators with partisan elections. I think Alberta’s system is much better.
So is Alberta’s method of reporting election returns online. Alberta uses a two dimensional array in which the rows are the records of the votes cast by the parties, and the columns are the fields. The name of each legislative district is the name of the record, and links to a second table in which the rows are the polls (what we call precincts) and the columns, the fields, are the candidates for the parties. It’s easy to navigate. The data can be copied and pasted into a spreadsheet. Montana’s online reports are not organized the same way and are much harder to use. Alberta’s system is better; Montana should adopt it.
Perils of first past the post in a multi-party system. Alberta’s election provides one example. Last week’s election in the United Kingdom provides another. At Talking Points Memo, Josh Marshall reports that the United Kingdom Independence Party received 3.9 million votes, but won only one seat in Parliament, while the Tories won 331 seats, a majority, with 11.3 million votes, and Labor won 232 with 9.3 million votes. And Montana State University political science professor David Parker observes that an alternative to the UK’s splitting into several independent republics is the adoption of a federal system on the American model.