Once again we are seeing call for “strategic voting” to block a Conservative phoney majority (they likely won’t even get 40% of the vote but could get around half the seats). And like past campaigns, these calls will probably do more harm than good.
In past elections, there is no evidence that negative/insincere (nothing “strategic” about it) voting does in fact work. There are several reasons for this:
1) riding by riding polls are based on very small sample sizes and are therefore very unreliable. They are also not done as frequently as national polls, making their information dated by the time election day rolls around – assuming voters actually wait and don’t vote prematurely in the advance polls.
2) Pareto’s law dictates that for every voter who actually researches the issue, there will be nine others who do little or no research and simply vote based on the national polls. As has been shown in previous elections, this has often turned NDP seats into Conservative ones.
3) Even among those who do research, the mistaken belief that the party with the most seats gets to form the government often leads them to vote Liberal anyway. Again, this has turned NDP seats into Conservative ones.
4) There are a number of financing arrangements, not least the per-vote subsidy, that require parties to make a significant showing in the ridings. Insincere voting disproportionally hurts the smaller national parties like the NDP and Greens while promoting the message that voters only have two choices – the Liberals or the Conservatives. This becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
In short, negative voting, however well intentioned, is counterproductive both in the immediate term and even more so in the long term.
Our first past the post electoral system requires that the winning candidate get precisely one vote more than the second place finisher. Excess votes don’t increase his or her voting power while all other votes provide no voting power in Parliament. In a typical election between 2/3 and 3/4 of all votes are therefore ineffective.
What we need is a proportional system where all votes are effective in changing the seat counts in Parliament. Rather than promoting tactics that have already proved to be harmful, people should be calling for a democratic voting system for Canada.
I think argument (1) is a little weak, since voters’ best guesses are probably much better than chance; (2) is very weak: my strategic vote has nothing to do with someone else’s badly thought-out strategic vote; (3) is the weakest of all: why base an argument on condemning ignorance when in the same amount of words you could overcome that ignorance? and (4) is really two arguments: the first is weak because I can simply send $2 to the party I prefer. There’s certainly something to be said for the second point. The problem is always that we can never know what everyone else will vote, so strategic voting is never safe. On the other hand, voting with your convictions can produce perverse outcomes too. I think we have to vote strategically based on research when we think it might help, support the party we prefer otherwise, and keep working for electoral reform.
Unfortunately in the real world you need to accept that others are going to have different goals than yourself. When people vote sincerely, even given the distortions of our electoral system, parties at least get a feel for what the voters want. When you start voting negatively, politicians lose that.
Moreover, your idea of a good outcome is probably not universal. By encouraging people to vote insincerely, you are promoting the notion that our voting system can be fixed by people just voting better.
And how many people are going to send in money to a party they didn’t vote for?
If you look at Australia, a nation somewhat like Canada, their AV system basically incorporates negative voting into the ballots. And guess what, it doesn’t produce results that are different from the Canadian experience.
When I look at the Catch 22 ridings, I see many examples where Liberal defections to the Conservatives far outweighed any “strategic voting” swings to the recommended candidate. We will never know how the ridings may have gone if everyone voted sincerely but it appears the results would be no worse.
The failure of the ABC negative voting campaigns is self evident. The Conservatives got their majority. They did this despite barely moving in the polls. Instead they won a large number of former Liberal seats, many of which were considered safe, due to Liberal voter defections to the Conservatives.
It appears that Harper’s “a vote for the Liberals is a vote for the NDP” message gave him the win. Campaigns that told voters they should vote insincerely helped him with his message.
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http://nationaldayofaction.ca/
Looks to me like the Liberals and NDP got caught on a sloppy line change, Harper banked one off Ignatieff’s head and scored a majority—as a direct result of strategic voting in Ontario.
I wonder if the NDP is as keen as they used to be now that it is the beneficiary of FPTP?
PR is still the official policy of the federal NDP. Moreover, it is far from certain that the NDP have permanently supplanted the Liberals.
What has changed is that the Liberals can no longer assume that they are Canada’s natural governing party. It’s possible that they will re-evaluate their position on electoral reform.
So far they’ve been flirting with AV because they believe that they will always be the main beneficiary. However, as the third place party they could find themselves wiped out by AV. PR is their only real guarantee of continued relevance.
There seem to be a number of definitions of “negative voting” kicking around cyberspace. I am interested in the idea of being able to vote against candidates who are especially odious, as people can “disapprove” of offensive comments on the Globe and Mail or CBC news sites.
This would have limited application in a partisan 3- or 4-way race at the provincial level, but in a local election, where (in my home town) we are looking at 25 candidates for 6 council seats, and some will get in based on name recognition alone. The negative mechanism would generate a more bland but safer council; somebody who took 3,000 positive votes and 500 negatives would defeat someone who earned 5,000 positives and 3,000 negatives.
As for your post, I agree that “insincere” voting does not produce the best long-term results, but the same is true for our party and electoral systems generally. Cheers.
Thomas Ian McLeod, Maple Ridge, BC.
Odious is sometimes a matter of opinion. I’m also not sure how negative voting could work.
In the Globe & Mail comments, you get to rate each post. Following this analogy, a modified Acceptance Ballot where you rate each candidate as acceptable, neutral or unacceptable could be done I suppose. However, in a tightly partisan race, you could end up with candidates no one knows sneaking through the middle with a very low overall acceptance rating.
I suggest that something like STV would work better. While some candidates might still get in only on name recognition, others would be elected based on work in their community. Also, breaking the monopoly of one councilor per district means that councilors need to work to keep your vote.
The problem that makes people consider negative voting is that our electoral system doesn’t allow people to select who represents them. Instead, it divides the electorate into winners and losers in each electoral district with few people having effective votes (ones that actually change the result).
If everyone had an effective vote that gave them the representative of their choice, there would be little interest in trying to deny others the representative of their choice. Interestingly, most nations use just such a system – proportional representation.
What you are describing is in fact NOT “NEGATIVE” voting at all. There are two kinds of votes which commonly get mislabeled as “negative” in the USA’s election system. One is “neutral voting” which is to abstain from voting, and say so. The other is “false positive voting” where your negative vote is cast FOR what you see as a candidate who may potentially keep out the one you are against by winning the election. THIS is the problem. The SOLUTION is to allow TRUE NEGATIVE votes, so that people who oppose a candidate do not have to choose between false representation and no representation. For more information… http://www.facebook.com/notes/occupy-hunger-strike/an-easier-solution-a-net-approval-voting-system/229304087140661
It is negative in the sense that you are marking your ballot based on trying to ensure that someone doesn’t get elected. This is in contrast to normal voting where you mark a ballot based trying to elect someone.
Voting against someone is not voting. It is protesting. If you don’t feel anyone running can reasonably represent you then why aren’t you running yourself? If you think it’s because you can’t get elected then change the voting system so that your views, if they have a reasonable constituency, can get represented.
Approval voting ins NOT a reasonable alternative to the status quo. If we went to an approval voting system then we can only elect broadly acceptable candidates. Minorities would not get representation. This would no more solve your lack of reasonable and electable candidates than the current system does.
The answer is a reasonably implemented system of proportional representation that allows people to be represented based on what they believe, not on what they oppose.
why don’t you make coalitions? if two or more parties decide to run altogether, they put only a candidate in every costituency. Where’s the problem?
That’s not democratic and will probably backfire. Having two parties conspire to defeat a candidate will simply cause that candidate’s supporters to come out in larger numbers. Given our dismal voter turnout, it won’t take much for this effect to work. Moreover, parties have no direct control over their supporters. Many Liberals will balk at supporting the NDP and vote Conservative instead. In Oshawa, for example, the combination of effects simply reinforced the Conservative’s margin.
well, obviously an electoral system should be customized the population. If canadians hate coalitions, you should choose a system where there’s always a winner (more than 50% of the seats) but every party is represented. PR is surely not the answer…
I don’t think Canadians hate coalitions. Your initial comment was about having parties collude to deny voters a choice of candidates. That’s dramatically different from giving the voters their choice then negotiating a government based on who the voters chose.
The idea of giving one party supported by fewer than 50% of the voters 100% (majority) power is the real problem. When a decision needs to be made between two choices, neither of which infringes on the rights of anyone, then the majority rules. However, giving one party, even if it got more than 50% of the vote (not just 50% of the seats), complete control isn’t democracy. It’s dictatorship.
The Swiss legislature is not only elected proportionally but the government is formed by all parties in rough proportion to their seat count. Barring that, the coalitions that govern most democratic nations are a reasonable alternative.
Plurality rule should be considered unacceptable by anyone who believes that democracy is the best form of government.
I precieve a situation where existing big party machineries all support the status quo – given that all but perhaps the green party’s party machinery will be anniahlated then re-assembled by any progressive change the the electoral system. Party machineries care less about wins or losses than staying in the game and getting paid. Candidates must be careful because they must cater to their party machineries, but candidates themselves might often do better if they stood up against their party machines and came out swinging against FPP along with you and me, the electorate. Until the NDP plucks up the courage make serious public offers to stratiegically pull candidates with the Liberals in order to have a chance at defeating the Harper Conservatives, I’m not donating to support their guaranteed to lose party machinery. I’d rather donate the same money to Fair Vote Canada until the NDP machinery puts our money where its mouth is, puts the Liberals on the spot and Electoral Reform in the spotlight.
I have to disagree. Half the Liberals would rather vote Conservative than NDP. Some NDP members would also rather vote Conservative than Liberal. Other members would just as soon stay home if their party wasn’t fielding a candidate.
Meanwhile a united front against the Conservatives would inspire Conservative voters to come out in larger numbers.
The end result, as we keep seeing, is that the Conservatives end up taking more seats than if there hadn’t been an “ABC” campaign. This isn’t speculation – it’s what we’ve seen happen every time campaigns have been mounted to stop the Conservatives.
Of course, I endorse contributing to Fair Vote Canada. It’s time we had a democratic voting system in Canada. However, with the Liberals endorsing AV instead of PR, the NDP and Greens are the only ones supporting PR. Unless the Greens make a big breakthrough, we can only work to ensure that the NDP keep their commitment to PR.
The NDP can not keep its committments to PR without winning a majority of seats in the house. That will not happen under FPP so long as the radical right is consolidated, and the centre is fragmented. We have nothing to lose. We might as well stop wringing our hands long enough to gang up on Harper, and give PR a real chance. Yes, there will be Liberals who turn Tory, there will also be Torries that support proportional represtation – it’s all hypothetical and speculation as you say yourself. It will also put FPP and PR in the spotlight which would be a very very good thing; the more people talk about it the better. It’s not rocket science, and PR’s biggest enemy is apathy. Bottom line, what we’re doing now is sure to fail. It is time for us to threaten our centrist parties with financial starvation if they fail to comply with our simple demands.
Again, I have to disagree. The NDP and the Conservatives have been close in the polls since the last election. The problem is, the Conservatives lose votes to the Liberals and vice-versa. If the Liberals falter, the Conservatives will pick up their right-wing votes as much as the NDP pick up the left. Like we’ve seen in every other nation with a two-party system, there will be periods when the left form the government and periods when it’s the right.
If the Liberals maintain their strength, a minority government is likely. That would put the onus squarely on the Liberals to figure out which party to support and whether to accept PR. I don’t hold out much hope of them supporting PR but you never know. There are PR supporters in the Liberals and they may convince the Liberals that their salvation depends on it.
However, I said that the danger of “ganging up on the Conservatives” backfiring is not speculation. It’s happened every time it’s been tried. Electoral cooperation is a losing proposition for 2015.
We either have to grow a pair and stand together against Harper unless we luck out and Justin Trudeau crosses the floor to join the NDP. If we do nothing we’ll keep losing for sure. It’s my money, and I won’t donate it to a party that would rather a momentary turn at the trough to saving Canada with electoral reform. There’s no point in winning an election until we have fair elections, because we’ll just lose everything again when it goes unfair in the other direction. I don’t want a 2 party bi-polar Canada, I want a parlaimentary democracy with a fair voting system. That’s why if a party want’s my money, and they do, they can eat some humble pie and try sokmething that might actually work.
Being angry doesn’t do much. Nor does stating positions without evidence to back them up. The American Tea Party exists in an angry, fact-free environment. I don’t consider them to be a good model for how to accomplish worthwhile goals.
I agree that we don’t want a two-party system but I don’t agree that the way to get it is to introduce a two-party system in our next federal election. Three parties gives us a better chance of a minority government led by the NDP, which is a potential winning situation for fair voting.
If the Liberals collapse, having them as a electoral cooperation partner is a bad move. However, it would lead to a 50/50 shot at getting the NDP as the government. Mulcair has said that PR will be on their platform and I think the NDP rank and file will hold him to it.
Ganging up on the Conservatives will simply encourage the right wing to show up while encouraging everyone else to stay home if their favoured party isn’t endorsed in their riding. Given that almost half of voters don’t show up in normal elections, that will give the Conservatives the edge they need to win another phony majority.
I’m all taking action when required, but I also believe that it has to be the correct action. Having the Greens throwing their support behind the NDP for a promise to implement PR when elected could work. Getting Trudeau to stop criticizing PR would also help.
Expecting Liberal votes + NDP votes = (Liberal + NDP) votes is just bad math.
Expecting Liberal Votes + Expecting Conservative votes + NDP votes > remaining Conservative + lost Libral votes.
If the majority of Canadians really prefered a Conservative government, then that will be fine and we can have one. But we don’t. It’s math.
Here’s the scheme, and it has nothing to do with anger or posturing, just a political desire to have my constitutional right to free and fair elections to be respected without these shenanigans:
RATHER than donating to your political party, send it a note to let it know that you will donate to Fair Vote Canada INSTEAD, at least until your party gets serious about realizing a fair, proportinal voting system. That means it must champion proportional representation, as the New Democrat and Green Parties already claim they do. But that on its own is insufficient; it must also promise to strategise with other such parties to remove (their already least popular) spoiler candidates in order to win the majority required to make a fair electoral system law, immediately disolve parliament and call Canada’s first ever fair election under an appropriate proportional voting system with all candidates running.
The Conservative dominated senate could block parliament’s fair voting system legislation, but not without serious political fallout, a new widespread awareness of and spotlight on voting systems, a surge in political will to abolish the senate, and a new successful mutually-beneficial system to remove mutual-spoiler candidates. Even if blocked by the senate, it would remain a major and sustainable victory for us, the Canadian electorate.
Removing the “spoiler” candidates is a tactical error. As we keep seeing in Durham and other ridings, the perception that the other parties are ganging up on the Conservatives encourages the Conservative supporters to come out in larger numbers. This and the fact that the “spoiler” candidate’s supporters either stay home or (as is often the case) end up supporting the Conservatives means that any attempt to defeat the Conservatives through “electoral cooperation” is doomed to fail.
An NDP/Green arrangement for one-time Green Party support in exchange for an agreement to bring in PR would be a different beast. Because it’s not “ganging up” in any particular riding, the Conservatives wouldn’t feel as threatened while the Green Party supporters would have good reason to come out to vote NDP.
However, this would only work in a close race for a phony majority. The NDP wouldn’t do it if they didn’t need the support and it wouldn’t work if the NDP didn’t have a chance of forming the government.
A national referendum would be something that the Senate couldn’t overturn, but it would not be a guaranteed success. Certainly the media would come out against it, as would the Conservatives. The Liberals may support it if they are reduced to 10% or less support but probably wouldn’t if they have 20% support.
While I care who wins an election, I care far more that it is a fair election. Until the latter is satisfied, which it is not, the former remains only second priority. This is especially true now and for the forseeable future because so long as elections are not fair, we will suffer extremist Conservative rule anyway. I can still vote for my preferred local candidate, but I will not give any money to any political party machinery until it gets serious about practicing restraint and making deals with other parties to bring about fair elections.
The Liberals flat out rejected PR as a condition for the Dion/Layton coalition. Since then they have endorsed AV and Trudeau is badmouthing PR every chance he gets. Making a deal with them doesn’t seem like a good way to bring in PR.
Yes, but we can at least offer a scheme, putting the ball firmly in their court and clearly making them the bad-guys until they change their tune. There are plenty of liberals who want proportional represenation, not least prospective Liberal leadership candidate Johnathan Mousley. I’d like to see PR become a wedge issue in the Liberal leadership debates, and for all parties in the next election. I’m including pro-PR literature with my hand decorated xmas cards this year! Thank you for helping me hone my thoughts and arguments. We have our work cut out for us.
Good luck. Do you know John Deverall? He’s also working in the Liberals to get them to endorse PR.