It existed in two incarnations from 1905 - 1913 and again from 1921 - 1959, with the city (small as it was in former times) broken up into separate single-member constituencies in the other time-periods.

The district was created when Alberta became a province, to encompass residents of the city of Edmonton on the northside of the North Saskatchewan River.

As a semblance of proportional representation, the UFA government brought in ranked voting for all constituencies starting in 1924.

It maintained Edmonton, Calgary and Medicine Hat as multi-member constituencies, with seats now filled through Single transferable vote, which at the time was called the Hare system or simply as Proportional representation.

In 1959 the Social Credit government broke up the Calgary and Edmonton constituencies and replaced the transferable balloting with first-past-the-post single-member districts across the province.

[4] The first table shows at a glance, the number of seats available by general election year for the Edmonton riding.

(Note: Independent Citizens were members of the Unity League, an anti-SC coalition of Liberals, Conservatives and others.)

In the 1913 Alberta general election Premier Arthur Sifton, his lieutenant Charles Wilson Cross and Liberal candidate Alexander Grant MacKay each won nominations in two electoral districts.

The Calgary Herald (a Conservative newspaper) surmised that Sifton and Cross were so scared of the electorate they felt they might not win if they ran in just one district.

Charles Cross would sit as a member of the Legislative Assembly of Alberta for both Edmonton and Edson.

With the rest of the votes split among other parties, the Liberals with possibly only a third of the voter support did take all the Edmonton seats in this election.

)[9] With voters at complete liberty to rank the candidates along whatever criterion they wanted, some votes were transferred across party lines.

Thus naturally the end result under STV differed from the party vote shares as per first preferences.

But in this case the results were roughly proportional to each party's take of the first preference votes with two Conservatives, a Liberal, a Labour and a UFA winning seats.

They also each had votes received by early successful candidates that were transferred due to being surplus to the quota.

Prevey (Liberal) and Duggan (Conservative) won seats without the quota in the last counts, after other candidates were eliminated or elected.

Another Conservative (Duggan) - plus a Liberal (Prevey) - got seats by being relatively popular among the last ones still standing as the field of candidates thinned to just one more than the number of remaining open seats, at which time the two top remaining candidates - Conservative Duggan and Liberal Prevey - were declared elected, although not having quota.

Four of that group's candidates placed in the top five spots in the first count, but this was un-proportional and the process thinned them down.

Lymburn, a former UFA cabinet minister, was running as an anti-SC Unity League candidate.

There was such a high number of exhausted ballots because about half of the voters who voted for the SC, Soldiers Rep and Liberal candidates did not give second preferences.

Johnnie Caine, a WWII ace, running as an Independent, was personally popular but did not get quota in the first count and not having a party behind him, did not receive many of the other candidates' second preferences when they were dropped off.

His surplus votes helped elect two other SC candidates, Heard and Adams, at the end.

His surplus was not distributed, perhaps because by then the count was at an end with only two candidates left standing to fill two remaining seats.

Result was roughly proportional to the first preference vote shares of the three parties that ran in this contest.

(The Conservatives stayed out, supporting Page, an opponent of the SC government, running for the Independent Citizens' Association.)

Another possible cause was that elections with higher than normal turnout saw inexperienced voters attempting to mark ranked ballots for the first time.

In part this was due to the choice being between electrical generation by a city-owned corporation or by the provincial government.

On October 30, 1957, a stand-alone plebiscite was held province wide in all 50 of the then current provincial electoral districts in Alberta.

The plebiscite was intended to deal with the growing demand for reforming antiquated liquor control laws.

[16] Municipal districts lying inside electoral districts that voted against the Plebiscite were designated Local Option Zones by the Alberta Liquor Control Board and considered effective dry zones, business owners that wanted a license had to petition for a binding municipal plebiscite in order to be granted a license.