Alberta provincial electoral districts are currently single member ridings that each elect one member to the Legislative Assembly of Alberta. There are 87 districts fixed in law in Alberta.
History
The original twenty five districts were drawn up by Liberal Member of Parliament Frank Oliver prior to the first general election of 1905. The original boundaries were widely regarded as being gerrymandered to favour the Alberta Liberal Party, although the Liberal Party did receive the majority of votes in the 1905 election and thus rightly formed majority government. Every boundary redistribution since 1905 has been based on the original boundaries, with districts being split or merged.
Starting in 1909, districts were grouped to make multiple-member districts. Most members continued to be elected in single-member districts but every election from 1909 to 1955 saw members elected in one or more multi-member districts.
From 1905 to 1924 with only a few exceptions each district elected a single member on the First Past the Post system. Calgary and Edmonton as well as Medicine Hat were elected on a plurality block vote, where 2 or 5 members were elected in a city-wide district and each voter could cast as many votes as seats to be filled.
There were also two cases where members were elected outside of the geographical districts and did not represent any districts. Such was the case in the world wars when Albertans serving overseas voted for their own representatives.
From 1924 to 1956 Calgary and Edmonton MLAs were elected in multiple-member districts encompassing whole cities using Single transferable vote to elect five to seven members. In 1926, Medicine Hat was a two-member district, electing its members through Single Transferable Voting. Outside these cities single-member districts elected single MLAs using the Alternative Voting system (Instant-runoff voting), with vote transfers taking place only if no candidate had a majority of the vote in the first count.
By-elections in the two big cities during this period were conducted using Alternative Voting (Instant-runoff voting). Under STV, some results were known as soon as the first vote count was done, but some seats took a couple days of vote transfers to fill. But the mixed representation elected in each city under STV, reflective of the mixed sentiment of the city's voters, was thought worth the wait.
There were no district changes between 1926 and 1940. But Edmonton and Calgary were given one more member then reverted down to five members again in 1940.
With Alberta in a population boom in the 1950s and Calgary and Edmonton growing, single transferable vote may have been seen as too complicated, with vote counting taking days before final results could be announced. But the Social Credit government's rationale for the change away from STV and IRV was that a large number of votes were being declared spoiled. No other major social unit favored the move but the government made the change anyway. The government felt threatened by the growing number of opposition MLAs being elected (although it was still taking more than 60 percent of the seats in the Legislature). In 1959 the government returned Alberta to First past the post elections in single-member districts, last used across the province in 1905. No government has since changed the electoral system (although since then the number of members has increased from 61 to 87).
In 1977 Elections Alberta was established as an independent, non-partisan office of the Legislative Assembly responsible for administering provincial elections, by-elections and referendums.
1990s
The early 1990s proved to be a contentious period for delineation of electoral districts in Alberta. The Supreme Court of British Columbia ruling in Dixon v. Attorney General of British Columbia in 1989 invalidated the provincial electoral district re-distribution due to wide variations between electoral district populations for British Columbia, finding these differences inconsistent with the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Cognizant of this the Alberta Legislature tasked a Special Committee chaired by Taber-Warner MLA Bob Bogle to evaluate the re-distribution of electoral districts in the province. The Report of the Select Special Committee on Electoral Boundaries was submitted to the Legislature in November 1990 and was referred to the Court of Appeal of Alberta. While the Court of Appeals reference found the boundaries consistent with the Charter, the report was scrapped and amendments to the Electoral Divisions Act were introduced in early 1991 to effectively "Charter-proof" the new districts.