Blog Post #4 – The Strategic Voting Movement

A lot of Canadians are fed up with the Harper Conservatives and want them out. With the federal election only weeks away, I’ve been doing some research into the party platforms and I’ve discovered the strategic voting movement that focusses on voting out the Conservatives.

The basis of this movement “focusses on swing ridings or ridings where there is a possibility that the Conservatives could win due to the splitting of votes between the NDP, Liberals, and Greens” according to the Vote Together website. For information on your own riding, go to the Anyone but Harper website to enter your postal code to view the strategic voting recommendation. It will be very interesting to see how well strategic voting works.

Jacob Boon feels strategic voting won’t work. The polls indicate that although the Liberals are in the lead, they will be unable to garner enough votes for a majority government. Boon further states that “tactical voting sounds badass, and imbues Canadian voters with the confidence that they’re gaming the system like a sabermetric superhero” adding the cool factor to the strategic voting campaign. However, he believes that Canadians who vote are those who already have a strong political stance and that the strategic voting campaign will “play a very small role in the election compared to traditional sincere votes.”

Whether or not you believe in the strategic voting movement, I hope you vote Harper out!

References

Boon, Jacob. (2015, October 15). Strategic voting won't work and is bad for Canada: Voting with heart beats voting with smarts. The Coast. Retrieved from http://www.thecoast.ca/Campaignandsuffering/archives/2015/10/15/strategic-voting-wont-work-and-is-bad-for-canada.

Strategic Voting. Retrieved from http://strategicvoting.ca.

The Vote Together campaign. Retrieved from http://www.votetogether.ca/.