A stir was created in the federal election when a group of progressive voters started a Facebook group to facilitate vote swapping. Elections Canada investigated the matter and concluded that vote swapping is legal, but cautioned voters that there is no way to be sure that your swap is being honoured.
The practice has been controversial among progressive voters. As the blogger Dipper Chick put it, “the only thing less representative than a first-past-the-post system, is an FPTP system that’s been $%&@’ed with.”
But other progressive voters see strategic voting (and vote swapping, in particular) as an effective way to prevent the Conservative Party from winning a majority government. One of the people in support of vote swapping is the author of the blog More Notes from Underground. He spoke to Omar Ha-Redeye about the practice at a recent Progressive Bloggers barbeque.
Dan and Omar talked about the implications of our first past the post system and the challenges it presents to small parties who do not enough concentrated support to win seats. This led to a discussion about the prospects of changing our electoral system to a mixed-member proportional (MMP) system.
Less than a week ago, Jack Layton himself alluded to the possibility of a coalition to oust the Conservatives,
Jason Cherniak, a renowned Liberal lawyer and commentator, said in a post this past Friday,
Is it possible? Could strategic voting actually keep Conservatives out?
Tonda MacCharles said recently in The Star,
One thing the majority of Canadians (as opposed to the majority vote) seem to agree on, a Harper majority would be bad for everybody. Except for the Conservative elites, of course.
In fairness, Layton was referring to the possibility of cross-party cooperation after (not during) an election. I think that the long-term lesson here is that our electoral system is giving us results that don’t reflect the needs and preferences of voters.
My personal opinion is that I am against strategic voting, especially since most voters do not have a realistic idea of which candidates are competitive in their riding. However, I think that those who endorse strategic voting would do well to check out DemocraticSPACE.com just before E-Day, as Greg Morrow puts out a “strategic voting guide” which lists the ridings in which strategic voting makes sense. These lists are based on his historically reliable election modeling.
BTW, Omar, I love the background convos in your interview, where you can clearly hear the words “Twitter” and “Facebook”… very Web 2.0! I wish I could have been at the BBQ.
Yes, you’re entirely right about the Layton quote, but it does hopefully reflect a shift in thinking among the Center/Left in the realization that there is more in common that there are differences.
I definitely wish you were at the BBQ; it was a very tech-savvy group, and we had some interesting exchanges.
Unfortunately I missed the only chance I had to attend on of the PB get-togethers when I was still in Ontario and now that I am in Winnipeg, the odds of me getting to come to any in the near future are slim to nil. :(