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strategic voting
I'm one of many young voters whose first election experience has been defined by strategic voting.
Either they remain content to let others make decisions about their future, or they increase turnout and have a profound effect on the Ontario election.
A preferential ballot system levels the playing field for all candidates. Like the per-vote subsidy, it will promote more party/candidate loyalty on the first vote. Unlike the last election, strategic voters won't need to choose between voting for the party they like and voting for the party they think can beat party/candidate X. They can do both.
The greatest worry about Justin's pre-electoral inexperience was his sympathetic talk about oil pipelines and, for those of us in BC, Premier Christy Clark's aspirations for LNG. True, Mr. Trudeau didn't keep his mutually exclusive views a secret. He had already made his thoughts known about how it could be done "environmentally responsibly," a notion that's in contrast to the overwhelming science on climate change.
It's possible a lot of candidates would have won anyway, especially the Liberal ones.
Thirty per cent of Canadian voters (over 5 million) have little to no partisan attachment. By comparison, only eight per cent of U.S. voters swing their party support, and thus the elections. A large non-partisan voting bloc explains the 2015 shift from orange to red, where in a span of three weeks, 1.4 million voters changed their mind from NDP to Liberal. This provides the perfect environment for strategic voting to swing elections. After four years of a majority Conservative government elected against the will of 61 per cent of Canadians, strategic voters became a major voice in this election.
Calgary strategic voting group 1VoteMatters identified leading progressive candidates across Canada in advance of the Oct. 19 federal election.
Right now, there is significant movement among progressive voters to undertake strategic voting to support the leading opposition candidate, generally a Liberal or NDPer, in each riding to ensure the ouster of the Harper Conservatives.
If someone does not see much difference between NDP, Liberal, Bloc and Green policies they have not yet done their civic duty. Note the billions of public dollars that will be spent in dramatically different ways, the manner in which those promises will be funded and the starkly dissimilar approaches to democratic reform, climate change, civil liberties and foreign policy that these supposedly interchangeable parties advocate.
1votematters aims to use data to strategically elect progressive candidates in Alberta.
