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Max's election maps and assorted others

Here's some Canada again - thanks to an excellent site find, I'm going to be able to do a lot of older elections if and when I want to.

This is the groundbreaking Saskatchewan election of 1944, possibly the most exciting thing ever to happen in Saskatchewan, wherein the Liberal government in power for the preceding ten years (and with one interruption, since the province's creation in 1905) was decisively turfed out by the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation, a slightly awkwardly-named socialist grouping led by firebrand Baptist preacher and social reformer Tommy Douglas. The CCF won all but five seats in the province, backed by disenchantment with the lack of recovery from the Dust Bowl years. This was the first socialist government ever elected in North America, and Douglas went on to be the longest-serving Premier in Saskatchewan's history, sitting until 1961 when he went off to be leader of this new thing the kids were calling the "New Democratic Party", in which post he'd become known as the Father of Medicare and voted the greatest Canadian ever in a CBC poll. But that's all another story.

View attachment 13208
Nice work Max. I assume the two-member seats in the cities were bloc vote?
 
Remember that time Ontario, the most British part of Canada, the home of the United Empire Loyalists and the centre of the Canadian chapter of the Orange Order, elected a worker-peasant government?

To be fair, it was 1919. World War I had made itself felt across Canada, as a generation of boys and men marched to war in the name of the British Empire and either died in Flanders fields or came home to find it had all been for very little. Ontario might not itself have felt the war's ravages, but the Ontarians had, and when the provincial assembly expired in October 1919, they were baying for blood.

The incumbent Conservative government was in its fourth term, and had not made itself popular as a wartime administration. Nonetheless, Premier William Hearst (yes, really) was reasonably confident in his chances of re-election. Having passed women's suffrage in 1917, Hearst's government now went to the polls on what had been the other major issue dividing the province - prohibition. A referendum on whether to prohibit alcoholic beverages was scheduled to take place alongside the election, and while the government's positive line carried the day, the voters clearly didn't translate this to backing the Conservatives.

The opposition Liberals made small gains, but the breakout winner of the election were the United Farmers of Ontario (UFO - yes, really), who had no organised province-wide campaign and only two incumbent members who'd won their seats in by-elections. Its General Secretary, James J. Morrison, hoped that the organisation would win enough seats to hold the balance of power, backing whichever side would give a better deal to farmers. He had absolutely no notion of forming a government, which was a bit awkward as the UFO swept rural Ontario and became the largest party in the new legislature.

The UFO did not, however, have a majority. For that, they needed the support of the (Independent) Labour Party, who had won eleven seats and now actually held the balance of power (for irony purposes one hopes this was after having hoped to form the government, but I somewhat doubt that). Morrison did not think the farmer and labour interests were compatible, and refused to entertain a coalition with Labour. Instead, the job went to Ernest C. Drury, a former minister in the Liberal government of the 1880s. Drury had jumped ship to the UFO when it was founded, but was not an MLA, so a by-election had to be held in Halton County to get him into the assembly.

Drury's government was a full Farmer-Labour coalition, supported by the "Soldier" MLA in Riverdale and a rogue Liberal in Grey North. It would create the earliest skeleton of Ontario's welfare state, creating provincial benefit systems for widows and orphans as well as UFO planks like a provincial savings bank and rural electrification. Drury was, however, adamant that it be seen as a government for all Ontarians, and it was perhaps to this end that he called on the opposition to provide a Speaker in the form of Liberal MLA Nelson Parliament (yes, really).

Weirdly, the broad-based policies of the Drury government brought it into conflict with the UFO organisation and James J. Morrison, who publicly withdrew his support for the government in 1923. That year, Drury had the assembly dissolved after failing to get STV through it, and the resulting election saw the Tories returned to power.

val-ca-on-1919.png
 
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Another example of what this basemap lets me do - the 1946 county council elections, the last held under the proper old system with most of the old constituencies intact before the municipal reforms of the early 50s shot a hole through them. It was also basically the only time the Social Democrats were seriously challenged from the left, though you only get a small hint of that here with Communists winning seats in places like Halmstad and Borås. In general, the south was never friendly to communists, and 1946 wasn't really an exception.

The system used here should ring a bell to @Heat in particular - but despite the small constituencies and d'Hondt distribution method, the Social Democrats only captured one county council (Malmöhus) out of the eleven depicted here. This is because the system allowed for list combinations that won the right-wing parties many more seats than they would've gotten otherwise.

val-lt-1946.png
 
Remember that time Ontario, the most British part of Canada, the home of the United Empire Loyalists and the centre of the Canadian chapter of the Orange Order, elected a worker-peasant government?

To be fair, it was 1919. World War I had made itself felt across Canada, as a generation of boys and men marched to war in the name of the British Empire and either died in Flanders fields or came home to find it had all been for very little. Ontario might not itself have felt the war's ravages, but the Ontarians had, and when the provincial assembly expired in October 1919, they were baying for blood.

The incumbent Conservative government was in its fourth term, and had not made itself popular as a wartime administration. Nonetheless, Premier William Hearst (yes, really) was reasonably confident in his chances of re-election. Having passed women's suffrage in 1917, Hearst's government now went to the polls on what had been the other major issue dividing the province - prohibition. A referendum on whether to prohibit alcoholic beverages was scheduled to take place alongside the election, and while the government's positive line carried the day, the voters clearly didn't translate this to backing the Conservatives.

The opposition Liberals made small gains, but the breakout winner of the election were the United Farmers of Ontario (UFO - yes, really), who had no organised province-wide campaign and only two incumbent members who'd won their seats in by-elections. Its General Secretary, James J. Morrison, hoped that the organisation would win enough seats to hold the balance of power, backing whichever side would give a better deal to farmers. He had absolutely no notion of forming a government, which was a bit awkward as the UFO swept rural Ontario and became the largest party in the new legislature.

The UFO did not, however, have a majority. For that, they needed the support of the (Independent) Labour Party, who had won eleven seats and now actually held the balance of power (for irony purposes one hopes this was after having hoped to form the government, but I somewhat doubt that). Morrison did not think the farmer and labour interests were compatible, and refused to entertain a coalition with Labour. Instead, the job went to Ernest C. Drury, a former minister in the Liberal government of the 1880s. Drury had jumped ship to the UFO when it was founded, but was not an MLA, so a by-election had to be held in Halton County to get him into the assembly.

Drury's government was a full Farmer-Labour coalition, supported by the "Soldier" MLA in Riverdale and a rogue Liberal in Grey North. It would create the earliest skeleton of Ontario's welfare state, creating provincial benefit systems for widows and orphans as well as UFO planks like a provincial savings bank and rural electrification. Drury was, however, adamant that it be seen as a government for all Ontarians, and it was perhaps to this end that he called on the opposition to provide a Speaker in the form of Liberal MLA Nelson Parliament (yes, really).

Weirdly, the broad-based policies of the Drury government brought it into conflict with the UFO organisation and James J. Morrison, who publicly withdrew his support for the government in 1923. That year, Drury had the assembly dissolved after failing to get STV through it, and the resulting election saw the Tories returned to power.

View attachment 13351
I love how Canada's electoral unpredictability has always been with us.

Also that almost looks like what a lot of people in the UK establishment feared the 1918 election would be like at home, I smell an analogous list.
 
And here's the entirety of Götaland (the southernmost and most populous of Sweden's traditional thirds) showing counties, hundreds and municipalities as of 1917.

kommuner-1917-stor.png

With the usual reservations for minor errors. Halland is probably tilted slightly too far to the west, in particular.
 
Ireland 1798 (constituencies)
And here's a quickie I have an odd feeling of having done before.

val-ie-1797.png

The Irish House of Commons, modelled on its English/British counterpart, was quite impressively undemocratic:
- Like the English House of Commons, all forty-shilling freeholders in each county has the franchise, which was actually a fairly substantial number for its time (230,000 out of five million Irishmen could vote). But, of course, this only went to electing 64 out of 300 members.
- With the exception of the two seats reserved for Trinity College graduates (yes, graduates only, not like those freethinkers in Oxford and Cambridge), the remaining seats were given over to the boroughs, of which there were a large number. As in England, these were sometimes large towns, but just as often random villages or deserted Norman camps with a handful of voters in them. What made Ireland somewhat different was that the vast majority of borough seats were corporation boroughs, meaning their member was nominated by the town corporation. Which meant that in the pocket boroughs, the landlord could just freely appoint a member without needing to bother going through the motions of an election.
- And of course, only Anglicans could vote or serve as members. That meant not only were Catholics excluded, but Ulster's many Presbyterians too.

The result was a thoroughly corrupt, incompetent assembly of three hundred Anglo-Irishmen, mostly from the lower rural gentry and the urban upper crust, who were basically as totally unrepresentative of the Irish people as the House of Lords were, and only a fraction of whom had any sort of electorate to keep them under scrutiny. Not a brilliant way to set up a legislature, you might think, and you'd be right.

The Irish Parliament had been subordinated to the English Parliament for most of its existence, but in 1782, a loose alliance of MPs led by Henry Grattan (dubbed the Patriot Party) were able to secure full home rule for the island. This led to a brief flourishing of reform, notably giving Catholics the franchise (but not the right to stand for election) in 1792, but they were soon overtaken by events. The United Irishmen, starting as a movement of dissident republican Presbyterians in Ulster, soon spread throughout the island and rose in rebellion in 1798. The resulting civil war was short but bloody, and it became clear that something had to be done. William Pitt the Younger, Britain's energetic young Prime Minister, promised a sweeping reform package that would bring Ireland into a united polity with Great Britain, lift the restrictions on Catholics in public life, and crack down on public corruption.

Pitt's way to get the Act of Union past the Irish House of Commons was neither very original nor very cunning - he offered £15,000 to all owners of pocket boroughs to compel their pocket members to vote for the bill. It did work, though, and Ireland ceased to exist as an independent country on New Year's Day 1801. The rest of Pitt's reform package stalled, however - most due to lukewarm interest, but Catholic emancipation because the King viewed it as a betrayal of his Coronation vow to defend the Church of England - and in the end, union brought none of the expected benefits for Ireland. Grattan and the Patriots bitterly resented the move, and the cause of Repeal and Home Rule would dominate Irish politics for the next century.
 
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