The 1948 Alberta general election was held on August 17, 1948, to elect members of the Legislative Assembly of Alberta.
Ernest C. Manning led the Social Credit to a fourth term in government, increasing its share of the popular vote further above the 50% mark it had set in the 1944 election. It won the same number of seats — 51 of the 57 seats in the legislature — that it had won in the previous election.
The remaining seats were won by the Cooperative Commonwealth Federation, the Liberal Party and independents.
This provincial election, like the previous five, saw district-level proportional representation (Single transferable voting) used to elect the MLAs of Edmonton and Calgary. City-wide districts were used to elect multiple MLAs in the cities. All the other MLAs were elected in single-member districts through Instant-runoff voting.
Along with this election, voters got to also vote in a province wide plebiscite. The ballot asked voters about utility regulation.
The fourth plebiscite conducted province-wide in Alberta's history, it was not a traditional yes–no question, but presented two options on electricity generation and transmission, asking if the province should create "a publicly-owned utility administered by the Alberta Government Power Commission"[1] or leave the electricity industry in the hands of companies already in the business (a mixture of municipal operations and private companies). The driving force behind the referendum was whether to provide rural electrification through public ownership or leave it in the hands of private corporations that had done very little up to that time and did not have the financial resources to perform the task.[2] Despite the referendum result, the government sponsored the creation of many Rural Electrification Associations, of which some still exist today.[3]
The result shows how evenly divided the province was on the issue, with a majority of only 151 votes in favour of leaving the old system in place. In fact, voters in Edmonton were effectively split and the rural areas were in favour of provincial control, but an even larger majority in Calgary voted to retain the old system.[4]
Ten districts went beyond first-preference counts in order to determine winning candidates:
All parties other than the Independent Movement fielded full slates.
Three parties had full slates. The Independent Movement presented four candidates, and Williams campaigned under his own banner.