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I thought it would have been much closer than it was.

Yeah, those also-ran parties tend to muddle things up. That's the downside with FPTP system.

   

The predominant feeling for the next four years, as Calgary and Edmonton figure out that we're being ruthlessly ruled by the gang from Hee Haw....

   

I was just looking at the Elections Alberta page and wow, but there are quite a few other parties there. They are showing a voter turnout of just over 62% and while that's better than the turnout in our last Federal election it still seems low to me. I'll never get why more people do not take the opportunity to contribute to the process.

https://results.elections.ab.ca/8400

   

The overall vote total is kind of irrelevant though in the Canadian system. The number of ridings that get won are what matters. Around 1800 votes going the other way, basically those beyond-priceless votes that the clowns in the provincial Liberals, Alberta Party, and Greens most likely siphoned away from the NDP, in a handful of strategic ridings would have resulted in an NDP majority. That's how narrow the difference between victory and defeat was for them.

And around 1 million out of 2.8 million eligible voters didn't bother showing up either, for what was probably the most critical election in the history of this province. So damn all of them too, because their indifference gave us MAGA and officially turned Alberta into Northern Alabama yesterday.

Democracy is an illusion as "the people" can no longer be considered as good, moral, or decent in the collective sense. The genuine rotters gaming everything for their own personal benefit, the true fools who truly believe in the populist nonsense they hear, and the explicitly stupid that go along with it like a slack-jawed herd of oblivious cattle are literally destroying everything around us with their malicious & moronic shenanigans. It's long past time to get rid of democracy and replace it with something else.

Donald Trump truly loved the low-information voter. Turns out that what Canadian conservatism has turned into really adores them too. Hope the rest of you are paying attention because in the federal election PeePee is going to do the same thing on a national level what the UCP did in Alberta. And given the seemingly endless scandals, of both the petty and really horrible variety, that the Trudeau Liberals engage in there's a good chance that enough Canadians might turn out in force to give the CP MAGAs a government too.

   

There are a few nuggets there too. At least 12 ridings were decided by 1.3% of votes. One riding was decided by 7 votes. The criminal Shandro lost that one.

So the NDP did really well, just not good enough. Only lost by 11 seats, which is the largest opposition ever in Alberta.

But Smith still thinks she won. But Albertans certainly did lose.

   

And the next election will be different too.

   

I don't buy that. The people voting for these parties were never going to back the main parties to begin with and add to the the silent majority that don't even bother to vote.

People need a reason to vote. Having more choice isn't a bad thing, if parties focused on what the people want the people will show up at the polls.

   

I agree. 40% of people didn't vote, either because they are jaded, or they don't have a place they can call home. Most people identify as centrist, but most parties don't.

   

According to Vote Compass, I should have voted for the Alberta Party (and I wanted to), not the NDP, but I held my nose and voted against what I preferred to, in an attempt to make sure the NDP won. They swept Edmonton, but lost the battle in Calgary, where as you noted, about 2,000 voters could have prevented Danni from forming government.

Unlike Thanos, I don't blame those who voted for a party other than the NDP, I think it falls on the 38% of voters who didn't bother casting a ballot. Given that 67% voted in 2019, my guess is the missing 5% are mostly former PC voters who couldn't stomach voting for the NDP. Sigh...

   

I don't blame those voters for choosing Liberal/Alberta Party/Green. I blame those parties for running candidates at all when everyone on their respective executive boards and the candidates themselves absolutely knew that, (a) they had no hope in hell of winning even a single seat in this province, and (b) they knew for sure that in multiple strategic ridings every vote they got ensured a UCP win when a NDP candidate had a probably chance of winning.

This is an Israel moment for Alberta in that multiple irrelevant parties ensured our own version of a Netanyahu ends up winning, and then proceeds to rip the place apart, because the miniscule parties siphoned enough votes away from the only actual major party capable of stopping the kooks in their tracks. All three of those parties should have suspended their participation in this election and openly put all their support, like former Liberal leader David Swann did, behind the NDP.

Voting for third parties that have no chance of winning is literally throwing your vote away. You might have the right to do so but those who do really shouldn't be clapping themselves on the back too much, not when their decision ends up making a bad situation even worse.

   

It's the reverse of how Notley won last time. Then, the vote got split on the right. This time, it was idiot leftists ruining things for everyone.

   

Conversely, if third parties don't run, we will be stuck in another two party system forever.

I'd rather people got out and voted for someone rather than stay home. The result may still be the same because they weren't going to vote anyway, but it offers the disaffected an alternative. And eventually, may offer real alternatives.

   

Democracy's disintegrated enough into a lower form that this inescapable binary of this or that/us or them we're all now in has been effectively cemented in permanently. As such more than two parties, especially ones that are incapable of capturing anyone's imagination on a widespread enough scale to make them competitive, become a danger to the overall dynamic if they end up causing the least-worst half of the binary to lose out to the much-worse half. I'm not young enough to still believe that a best half really exists anymore.

I don't vote anymore because I expect utopia to result or for the ongoing disintegration to be reversed. I only vote now to do my part to prevent the much-worse segment from having all the obstacles taken out of its path so its zealots can smash everything down as fast as they possibly can. If I were in the US, as an example, I'd certainly being voting Democrat, at least for POTUS anyway. But I wouldn't do that so I could yell out that I was be proud to be a Democrat or because I truly believed that the Democratic platform was some sort of height of human enlightenment. The Democrats have very little to be proud of, at least since the Clinton years, and have certainly done very little to deserve the loyalty they still receive from Americans. But voting for them would be the only way to halt the insanity at the executive level of what the GOP would do, as proven by the Trump era. If that's all that voting Democrat achieves then it's good enough.

There aren't too many best-case scenarios out there that are likely to happen. Doing the responsible thing to try to prevent the worst-case scenario from becoming a reality, as happened in Alberta yesterday, is really all that's left for the decent person to do anymore. Sometimes being part of a last-hope rear-guard action to hold back a flood of sheer awfulness from winning, and then thoroughly wrecking, everything in its path is the far more noble & honourable place to be.

   

At least with a two party system you have at least some kind of choice and the incumbent has to at least try to compete for votes.

I've seen a few right-wing pundits who seemed to get offended at the very idea that the election could be competitive, and that it wouldn't result in the complete blowouts of the PC dynasty. We complain about federal Liberal entitlement in Alberta, and with good reason. But some of our own homegrown conservatives almost seem to have the same sense of entitlement on the provincial level whenever some other political movement has the utter gall to question their right to lead.

And fuck FPTP. It was designed for a country that's about the size of Newfoundland (minus Labrador) and the Maritimes, and has nearly twice as many ridings/seats in its national Parliament as ours does. In a country and provinces our size, that means whole regions end up on the outside looking in, making them all look like homogenous blocs, which only makes things seem even more polarized and divided than they are.

   

In our current two party system, both parties are too extreme for many centrists. That's stifling voters, because they can't stand voting for either choice. I feel more choice means more voters. And perhaps they can attract the voters that held their nose and voted for one extreme rather than not voting at all. And it's not like they are going to skew results, because they weren't going to vote anyhow.



Yea, choice is the enemy of the authoritarian state. More reasons for more choice!



Testify! I still hold Trudeau to his promise of election reform, even though I know he was never serious about it.

   

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