by Maurice Y. Michaud (he/him)
The first-past-the-post electoral system is prone to yielding odd results, but those from the 1879 Ontario general election defy comprehension. This was not a “wrong winner” election, whereby the party with the most votes does not get to form government. Rather, it was a case where, with only 2 more votes province-wide, the Liberal Party managed to obtain 26 more seats than the Conservative Party. Most reasonable person would have expected that if the two parties were in a dead heat, the seat count should have been relatively close.
Complicating matters is how party lines were not firm in the 19th century as they are today. Candidates did not need to obtain the party’s nomination to run in a riding; they merely declared themselves “Liberal” or “Conservative.” That is why more than one candidate for the same party could be running for a seat. That said, the Conservatives still fell short in the seat count despite running seven more candidates than the Liberals.
 Ontario |
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4 → 1879 :: 5 Jun 1879 — 26 Feb 1883 —
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| Summary | Government | Opposition | Lost votes | ||||||||||
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| Party | Votes | Seats | Party | Votes | Seats | Party | Votes | ||||||
| # | % | % | # | # | % | % | # | # | % | ||||
Parliament: 4  MajorityMajority=45 Ab.Maj.: +12 G.Maj.: +24 Population [1871]: 1,620,851 Eligible: 392,085 Particip.: 63.22% Votes: 247,857 Lost: 8,691 Seats: 88 1 seat = 1.14% ↳ Elec.Sys.: FPTP: 88 ↳ By acclamation: 2 (2.27%) Plurality: Votes LIB Seats LIB
Plurality: ↳ +2 (+0.00%)Plurality: ↳ Seats: +26 (+29.55%) Position2: Votes LC Seats LC
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Candidacies: 189 (✓ 88) LIB 80 LC 87 OTH 3 IND 19
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LIB |
118,515 | 47.82 | 63.64 | 56 | LC
OTH |
118,513 2,111 |
47.82 0.85 |
34.09 2.27 |
30 2 |
OTH
IND
REJ
ABS |
606 8,085 —— 144,228 |
0.24 3.26 —— —— |
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| LIB By acclamation: 1. Got only 2 more votes than the Conservatives but won nearly double the number of seats.
LC By acclamation: 1
OTH → ICON 2 (✓ 2) LAB 1
!!! 39 (44.32%)
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So what could possibly explain the Ontario Conservatives’ fate in 1879? Was there a third party that acted as the spoiler? Coming to an answer is an exercise in speculation and is by no means definitive, but let’s try on a few theses for size.
That thesis doesn’t hold because, aside from the 19 independent candidates, there were only three who were neither Liberal nor Conservative: two were Independent Conservatives and won their seat, and one was Labour and he lost his seat... to a Conservative.
Nineteen candidates ran as independents. Together they got 8,085 votes (or 3.26%); none of them won. Moreover, in the 12 ridings where independents were running, the Conservative or Independent Conservative won, except in Oxford South. There, two independents were running against the Liberal winner, Adam Crooks, but the sum of their votes was less than Crooks’ plurality. So the independents can’t be blamed for the Conservatives’ woes.
That’s a thesis worth exploring, although it can’t be proven as categorically as a classic vote splitting incident can. It goes on the premise that when voter turnout dips below 72%, the chances that the number of uncast ballots exceeds the number of votes the winner received, meaning that the de facto winner is Nobody. In this particular election, there were 39 cases where Nobody won, but the turnout was below 72% in the majority of the ridings. Therefore, what could have been the impact of having a 75% turnout in those ridings where the Conservatives didn’t win?
To find the answer, let’s:
Thus we could say that there might have been 12 differences.
The result is shocking: 6,998 more votes in 12 ridings, with 3 in 5 of those going to the Conservatives, might have led to a tie. This is pure theory based on many assumptions, but it shows that, of those 12 ridings:
