Saskatchewan history was made Monday night — for the first time in provincial politics, a woman has been elected to succeed her father in his constituency.

Nancy Heppner, daughter of the late Ben Heppner, crushed six other candidates at the ballot box to take the Martensville byelection.

With 45 of 45 polls reporting at 9:40 p.m., Heppner, 35, had 3,549 votes, compared with 482 for her closest rival, NDP candidate John Tzupa.

It was a similar dismal finish for Liberal candidate Nathan Friesen, who finished with 344 votes.

Green Party candidate Sandra Finley received 100 votes; Kurtis Hein of the Saskatchewan Heritage Party received 37 votes; the Western Independence Party's Gordon Elias received 42 votes; and Nathan Holowaty of the Saskatchewan Marijuana Party ended the evening with 38 votes. There were six spoiled ballots.
 
Few observers were expecting anybody but Heppner to win the seat, which is in an area the New Democrats have never won. Ben Heppner, who died of cancer last year, had held the seat for 11 years.

However, the Saskatchewan Party's percentage of  the Martensville vote — about 77 per cent — was considerably higher than in the 2006 byelection in Weyburn-Big Muddy, where slightly less than half of voters cast ballots for the Saskatchewan Party.

The New Democrats' 10 per cent showing was well below the percentage they took in 2006. The same went for the Liberals, who received a little over 7 per cent this time.

The voter turnout was about 44 per cent, according to assistant chief electoral officer Dave Wilkie.

According to her campaign website, Heppner was born in Swift Current, worked as a bookkeeper and started her own bookstore before going to work for Carol Skelton, the member of Parliament for Saskatoon-Rosetown-Biggar. Last year, she was in Ottawa as federal Heritage Minister Bev Oda's director of communications.

The byelection leaves the standings in the legislature unchanged from before the vacancy, with 30 seats for the NDP and 28 seats for the Saskatchewan Party.

A general provincial election is expected to be called later this year.

Heppner's fellow MLAs will soon have an opportunity to see their new colleague at work — the spring sitting of the legislature begins on Wednesday.