How Vancouver elects its council
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This page is about the rules rather than the result: how a council election is counted, what the counting does to the ten seats, and what would change if the city voted a different way.
Here, we’ll focus on what’s different about Vancouver elections. We’ll presume you’ve already visited the tutorial for the federal and provincial elections. If you haven’t, we suggest you visit that first, then come back here.
For Vancouver, we’ll explore five systems: (1) At-Large Block Voting, the current system; (2) Proportional Approval Voting, the same ballots with a different counting process; (3) Wards, voting in ten single-member districts using the same system we use provincially and federally; (4) the Single Transferable Vote, voting in three districts each electing three or four councillors using a ranked ballot; and (5) STV+, STV with two top-up councillors elected city-wide.
Each of these systems is briefly described below. The cards and the coloured icons summarize which of three key features each system has: (1) one city-wide contest or local wards, (2) how you mark the ballot, and (3) whether you choose the person who took the seat.
How to read the icons
| FPTPALBV | One box or two: How many seats the district elects. One box is a single-member ward: one councillor, the way a federal riding works. Two boxes mean several councillors are elected together: the whole city today, or a district of three or four. |
| ALBVSTV | Checkmark or numbers: What you put in the box. A checkmark means you approve as many candidates as you like, up to ten. Numbers mean you rank them instead. An X means you mark one and only one. |
| ALBVFPTP | Green or orange: Whether you choose the person. Green means the seat went to a candidate you marked. The split box is the single-member ward, where your choice of candidate and your choice of party cannot be separated. |
At-Large Block Voting
Parties can run slates of up to ten candidates for council. Voters get ten votes, and can approve of up to ten candidates. They can split their votes across candidates from different parties and/or independents. The ten candidates with the most votes win.
The council results page also models STV+, which adds a small city-wide tier of seats on top of the district count to bring the council closer to the overall vote.
The council those ballots produced
One row per way of counting. Every row is drawn against the same ballots, so the blocks stay put and the seats are the only thing that can move.
Icons = seats wonShaded = share of approvals
The same ballot, counted by eliminating the weakest candidate round by round and redistributing each ballot’s weight across the candidates still standing.
| Seats · share | Vote share | |
|---|---|---|
| ABC | 550% | 35% |
| Forward Together | 220% | 12% |
| Green | 110% | 11% |
| OneCity | 110% | 10% |
| COPE | 110% | 7% |
| Seats · share | Vote share | |
|---|---|---|
| TEAM | 00% | 8% |
| Non-Partisan Association | 00% | 6% |
| Progress | 00% | 4% |
| Independent | 00% | 3% |
| Vision | 00% | 3% |
The shaded block is support
Each party gets a block proportional to its share of all the approval marks on the ballots. ABC's is by far the widest, at almost 35% of all marks.
The figures are seats
One figure for each seat that party won. Ten figures in all, because the council has ten seats.
Look where the figures end
ABC’s seven councillors run well past the end of its shaded block: it holds seats its share of the votes did not earn it. Other candidates attracted many votes, but won no seats. The numbers above the figure show how many more or fewer seats a party won than its vote share supports. Overall, 4.4 seats were awarded without a supporting vote share.
The same marks, counted again
This second row shows the same ballots counted differently. The blocks do not move, because nobody voted differently. Only the figures do, and the extra seats fall from 4.4 to 2.7.
The map, and what a ward would be
A seat total says how many won. It does not say where. Vancouver is unusual here, because today the answer is nowhere in particular: there are no wards, and every councillor is elected by the whole city.
Three districts, plus two city-wide seats
Vancouver has no wards. These boundaries are one way the city could be divided, not a division it has, and the party colours are modelled from the real ballots rather than counted from a ward election that happened.
One city, one district
There is only one contest. All ten seats are filled by the same ballot, marked by every council voter in Vancouver, so no part of the city elects a councillor of its own.
Now divide it into ten
This is what a ward is: a piece of the city with its own contest, electing one councillor. These ten follow the provincial riding boundaries, which is a division that already exists on the ground.
Or group them into three
For STV, we group the ten wards into three multi-member districts, each electing three or four councillors together. The colours show which parties those councillors came from, and the district drawn solid is the one whose ballot you will see next. A district this size is big enough that more than one party can win in it.
And two more, elected by the whole city
STV+ keeps those three districts and adds two more councillors, elected across the whole city and given to the parties the district count left furthest short of their vote share. They belong to no ward, so they sit in their own row below the map rather than colouring one.
Under Your Ballot we ask which of these wards is yours, and then draw each system’s council the same way this lesson has: seats as figures, standing on the share of the ballots that elected them.
The ballot
The previous sections are about the election results. This one is about your experience: the ballot you get, and how you mark it.
District: West
Three or four wards · 4 seats
Rank the candidates
District: West
- Adriane CarrGreen
- Breen OuelletteCOPE
- Brian MontagueABC
- Devyani SinghGreen
- Dominic DenofrioIndependent
and 15 more candidates
Write 1 beside your first choice, 2 beside your next, and so on. You can rank as few or as many as you like.
Nobody voted in a ward in 2022. At-large block voting and PAV both count the real approval ballots, so they can be compared directly; the ward systems are modelled from those same votes, and answer what Vancouver would look like divided rather than what it did.
ALBV and PAV: a city-wide vote
Your district is the whole city. Every voter in Vancouver marks the same ballot and helps fill the same ten seats.
Fifty-nine names, ten marks
This is a long ballot: fifty-nine names in the 2022 election, and you may approve up to ten of them.
Wards: a local vote
With wards you only see the candidates standing where you live: no more than one per party, and about ten names in all.
STV and STV+: a group of neighbourhoods
These systems give you more choice than a single ward: typically two or three candidates per party, and about twenty names on the ballot. You rank one or more of them in your order of preference.
That is how the counting works. Now check out the Vancouver 2022 city council election.
Or use the tabs at the top. They're always there.