This article provides a summary of results for the general elections to the Canadian province of Prince Edward Island's unicameral legislative body, the Prince Edward Island House of Assembly. The number of seats has varied over time, from a high of thirty-two between the 1960s and 1990s, to the current low of twenty-seven.
The chart on the right shows the information graphically, with the most recent elections on the right. [Could someone fix the election results chart? It omits the elections of 1890 and 1893.] It shows that Prince Edward Island has effectively a two-party system - the Liberal party (red) and Conservative party (blue). After the first two elections (when not all MLAs declared a party allegiance), only one MLA has been elected who has not been a member of these two parties. The Liberal party have won eighteen out of twenty-nine of the elections in the 20th century.
Prior to 1996, PEI used 16 dual-member ridings; the 32 members have sat together since the 1893 abolition of the Legislative Council. The boundaries for these ridings were drawn in 1893; a single change was made in 1966 (when the riding of Charlottetown, also known as 5th Queens, was split into two parts). In 1996, a court determined that the number of electors varied too much between ridings, and was therefore unconstitutional. This resulted in a new set of (single-member) ridings being created.
This article only covers elections since Prince Edward Island became part of the Canadian Confederation in 1873. Prior to that, Prince Edward Island was a British colony. The Prince Edward Island House of Assembly dates back to 1769.
The table below shows the total number of seats won by the major political parties at each election (if greater than zero). It also shows the percentage of the vote obtained by the major political parties at each election, if greater than 0.1%. The winning party's totals are shown in bold. To date, no party has formed a government that did not have the largest share of the vote. Full details on any election are linked via the year of the election at the start of the row.