Electoral ranges

Volatile voting patterns mean fourth parties can have effects.

by Inside Queen's Park

Of votes and numbers 
More than eight million Ontarians are eligible to take part in provincial elections, but in 2011 fewer than half of them turned out to vote. Of late, advocates for electoral reform, as well as many citizens of a pessimistic and some of an apocalyptic bent, have lamented the ceaseless downward trend in turnout.

There had been expectations that turnout would fall into minority territory in the 2007 election, but it ended up at 52.5 percent, poised to have the 2011 vote come in below the half-way mark, as it did — at 48.2 percent. There is no iron law prescribing that fewer and fewer will cast votes in every election. More than two-thirds took part in the election of 1975, and turnout grew in three successive elections as recently as 1985 through 1990. But pessimism is now entrenched on this score, and that has had the effect of distracting the attention of analysts from the more important shifts of major party votes. Let's try to redress that balance right away.

Voting ups & downs 
Most observers are used to expressing election results in percentage terms. In 2011, Party A got a vote share of 37.7 percent, Party B 35.4 percent and Party C 22.7 percent. That's clear as far as it goes. But looking at the numbers of votes represented by those percentages can be more illuminating. IQP tried to serve that need in the March 8 bulletin presenting key results of the 1981 through 2011 Ontario provincial elections.

Consider first the best showing for the three parties with seats in the Legislature. The Liberals put the other two parties in the shade by topping the 2 million mark (2,090,001) in 2003. The PCs' biggest vote was nearly 2 million (1,978,059) in 1999; and the largest total for the NDP was just over 1.5 million (1,509,506) in 1990.

Next, their poorest results. The Liberals gathered a few more than one million (1,072,680) in 1981; the PCs drew less than one millions (931,473) in 1987; and the NDP's smallest total was just above half a million (551,009) in 1999.

So the three parties ranged: for the Liberals, from just over 2M to just over 1M; for the PCs, from nearly two million to less than one million; and for the NDP, from over 1.5 million to just above half a million.

It's interesting to look as well at the Greens' best and worst showings of late: the Green Party of Ontario's push to elect members had them at 126,651 votes in 2003; they surged to 354,897 in 2007; and fell back again, to 126,021, in 2011.

It is also interesting to track the increases (decreases) in major party votes. The biggest bump from election to election was the 925,546 increase registered by the PCs from 1990 to 1995. The biggest Liberal increase was 460,146, from 1995-1999. And the largest hike in vote share for the NDP was the 538,693 gained from 1987-1990.

The biggest decrease recorded by the Liberals was their 1987-1990 drop of (486,080). The PC's biggest fall was the (418,848) from 1999-2003; and the NDP's largest loss was the (655,343) from 1990-1995.

Although there's no call to track the vote shares of any of what we used to call "fourth parties" except for the Greens, it's instructive to aggregate votes for all the splinter parties and the independent candidates. In 1981, they totaled not quite 25,000 (0.08 percent), but in 2007 they had climbed to well over 400,000 (9.4 percent). And back in 1990, the also-rans had piled up more than a quarter million votes. Such results become significant when votes drawn by a splinter party undermine a mainstream organization. Consider the beating which the Family Coalition Party laid on the PCs in 1990 to the great benefit of the NDP.

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