Manitoba’s general election in June 1920 was unusual in at least three respects. Among those elected to seats in the provincial Legislative Building were three convicted criminals—all participants in the 1919 Winnipeg General Strike. It was the first provincial election where a female candidate, Edith Rogers, was elected. And it was the first time the Proportional Representation voting system was used in a Canadian provincial election.
Political scientists argue about the most democratic system for electing our government representatives. In 1920, the Manitoba government tried an experiment. A form of proportional representation, Single Transferable Voting, had proven successful elsewhere so the government adopted it for election of MLAs in Winnipeg. Each voter was to have one ranked vote.
Election ballots in Winnipeg listed the candidates in alphabetical order. Voters wrote a number 1 beside their first choice, 2 beside their second choice, and so on, until they had ranked their preference for all candidates, or they no longer felt competent to rank the remaining ones. (A person could vote for a single candidate if they chose.) The votes were counted more than once. In the first round of counting, the number of “1” votes for each candidate were tallied and compared to a quota (one-eleventh of the total vote) above which a candidate was deemed to have been elected. Least-popular candidates were eliminated with their votes being transferred according to the rankings marked by the voter, until ten seats were filled.
It was a complex system and officials worried that voter confusion, especially among newly-enfranchised women and non-English-speakers, would confound the election results. In the end, however, it was generally conceded that the 1920 election proceeded without a hitch.
The new system was used only in Winnipeg. Unlike today, the entire city was a single constituency with ten representatives in the Legislature (previously, it had had six, two in each of three districts: North, Centre, and South). The two old-line political parties—Liberal (the incumbents) and Conservative—each fielded ten candidates. The four labour-oriented parties altogether fielded ten candidates. So, someone with partisan leanings could vote a straight ticket. Another eleven candidates were independents so there were a staggering 41 candidates listed on each ballot.
There were 47,427 votes cast in Winnipeg. The one-eleventh quota that meant certain and immediate election was 4,312 votes. Two candidates were elected in the first round of counting: Liberal candidate Thomas Johnson (barely above the threshold, with 4,386 votes) and Labour candidate and unconvicted 1919 Strike leader Fred Dixon (by a landslide, with 11,586 votes). The remaining eight seats were filled over the following days, the last seat finally being filled on the 36th round of counting. The final result was mixed and balanced—four Liberals, four labour (of three different labour parties, three of whom were residents at the Prison Farm), and two Conservatives.
As of the 1927 general election, a Instant-Runoff Voting system, similar to the one in Winnipeg, was used in other constituencies around Manitoba. The procedure was slightly different from the process used in Winnipeg. Where there were only two candidates in a constituency—which was the case in 13 constituencies in this provincial election—the outcome would be the same as under the former system: the person with the most votes won. However, when there were numerous candidates and no one won a majority of the votes in first count, the votes were counted more than once. In the first round of counting, the number of “1” votes for each candidate were tallied and compared to the quota (50 percent of the votes plus one) above which a candidate was deemed to have been elected. If no one had majority, the least-popular candidated were eliminated and their votes were transferred until someone had a majority.
In the 1949 general election, Winnipeg switched from electing ten MLAs overall to having three constituencies with four representatives each, with the results of each constituency decided by Single Transferable Voting. However, the provincial experiment with proportional voting ended in 1957. The general election of 1958 was the first one since 1920 where Winnipeg voters returned to our long-familiar system of marking their single preferred candidate with an X.
See also:
Events in Manitoba History: Manitoba Provincial Election (1920)
“Proportional voting plans are explained,” Winnipeg Tribune, 5 June 1920, page 13.
“Dixon has majority of 5,701 over his nearest opponent in 302 polls,” Winnipeg Tribune, 30 June 1920, page 1.
We thank Tom Monto for providing additional information used here.
This page was prepared by Gordon Goldsborough.
Page revised: 2 March 2025
