Electoral district of Colton

Colton is an electoral district of the House of Assembly in the Australian state of South Australia. It is a 15.5 km² urban electorate on Adelaide's western beaches, taking in the suburbs of Fulham, Fulham Gardens, Henley Beach, Henley Beach South, Kidman Park as well as parts of Grange, Lockleys and Seaton.

The electoral district is named after Mary Colton, who arrived in Adelaide in 1839 and worked for the welfare of women and children. She was the President of the Women's Suffrage League, and lived to see the introduction of equal voting rights for women in 1894.

Colton was created to replace the abolished seat of Henley Beach in the 1991 electoral distribution as a marginal Liberal seat. It was first contested at the 1993 election, where it was won in a large swing to the Liberals by former Adelaide City Council Lord Mayor Steve Condous, recording a 60.5 percent two-party vote from a 9.5 percent two-party swing. This was reduced at the 1997 election to 54 percent, and upon Condous' retirement at the 2002 election, it was won by Paul Caica for Labor with a 54.6 percent two-party vote, which increased to 66.3 percent at the 2006 election. This was reduced to 54 percent at the 2010 election and 51.5 percent at the 2014 election.

Electoral district

An electoral district (also known as a constituency, riding, ward, division, electoral area or electorate) is a territorial subdivision for electing members to a legislative body. Generally, only voters (constituents) who reside within the district are permitted to vote in an election held there. From a single district, a single member or multiple members might be chosen. Members might be chosen by a first past the post system or a proportional representative system, or another method entirely. Members might be chosen through an election with universal suffrage or an indirect election, or some other method.

Terminology

Electoral district (Canada)

An electoral district in Canada, also known as a "constituency" or a "riding", is a geographical constituency upon which Canada's representative democracy is based. It is officially known in Canadian French as a circonscription, but frequently called a comté (county).

Each federal electoral districts returns one Member of Parliament (MP) to the Canadian House of Commons; each provincial or territorial electoral district returns one representative — called, depending on the province or territory, Member of the Legislative Assembly (MLA), Member of the National Assembly (MNA), Member of Provincial Parliament (MPP) or Member of the House of Assembly (MHA) — to the provincial or territorial legislature.

While electoral districts in Canada are now exclusively single-member districts, multiple-member districts have been used at the federal and provincial levels. Alberta has had a few districts that returned from two to seven members: see Calgary, Edmonton and Medicine Hat. British Columbia had a mix of multiple-member districts in Vancouver and single-member districts elsewhere until the 1991 election, and Prince Edward Island had dual-member districts until the 1996 election.