The WAL

It’s always nice to receive a comment of any kind since it means someone’s actually reading what I write.  Thought I’d take this comment and make a post out of my response instead of just commenting back.  It made me think a little but not change my mind at all.

“As for strategic voting, it assumes that an individuals concerns and vote count for nothing. By voting strategically you are taking away funds from the smaller parties and are ensuring that only the old-boy parties are left to run again in the next elections. It destroys democracy as much as this first past the post wins everything system does. Ah well. It’s the new fad. Long live hairy women and bell bottoms. Written by: Anonymous”

Wish you’d left a name.  Maybe next time?

I think I have to disagree with the assumption that the individual vote means nothing in strategic voting.  But I do think that each vote means less than it did in days of yore when our two-party election system only had two parties.  You’d had enough of one, you voted for the other.  In a four or five party system, it’s dysfunctional.

The Liberals came up with a majority government in 1993, 1997, and 2000 with never more then 41.3% of the popular vote, and that 41.3% gave them a strong majority.  Is this right?  Should a government have solid majority power in this country when 6 in 10 people didn’t vote for it?

With the amount of vote splitting on the left at this point, strategic voting fills a valid need.  Say in the current election, you’re an NDP supporter (for example) and you really don’t want the Conservatives in power again, you’d normally vote NDP.  But what if the NDP doesn’t even have a snowflake’s chance and it’s a close race with the Liberal candidate, or vice versa?  You still don’t want the Con in, but with no hope of getting who you really want, your best hope of turfing your nemesis is to vote Liberal, much as it might hurt.

Strategic voting is hardly a perfect tool and it does nothing to address the huge gaping wounds in the system we’ve got.  I’d far rather vote for something than against something, but it gives us a partial balance.  And if, like me, you don’t live in a riding with a tight race, you vote your conscience.

Destroys democracy?  No.  Distorts?  Maybe, but perception isn’t reality, no matter how often you hear someone say it.  Strategy is important in any blood sport, and it makes sense to turn your vote into the biggest hammer you can.

I think a bigger issue is apathy.  Not even 65% voter turn out in the last election.  The Cons got 36.3% of 64.7%, so 23.5% of eligible voters put the government in power that currently runs things and wants to keep doing it.  That’s scary.

I’ve become a fan of strategic voting in our broken electoral system.  Broken, you ask?  Of course it’s broken.  It’s designed for a two party system and we’ve not got four significant players in English-speaking Canada, five in Québec.  Theoretically, you can win a seat in Ontario with 25% + 1 vote.  Majority governments have been won with less than forty percent of the popular vote.  Of course the system is broken, but what’s the incentive for a party in power to fix it?  The Ontario Liberals made it look like they were trying to a few years back by picking a system that few people understood and no one liked then letting us have a referendum on it without any clear communication on how it worked, but hey that’s better than no effort at all, right?  (Hope your sarcasm detectors didn’t overload there.)

So, strategic voting.  Rough translation:  vote for the politician in second place, regardless of your preference, to keep the one in first place out of office.  Rather than voting for something, you’re voting against something, but this is often the way it works anyway.  You’ve got a lot of choices of how to cast your vote when punishing a party you’re unhappy with.  Strategic voting helps focus the anti vote.

In the current election, if you’re not interested in the Conservatives keeping power (and who is, really), and you’re in a riding that’s a tight race, vote for the non-Conservative candidate who has the best chance of winning.  Yes, this may mean voting for a Liberal when you want to go NDP or Green.  Or some other combination.  In Québec, you might have to vote for a separatist to get rid of the Tory (that would be a hard bone to swallow for me, considering how I feel about separatists).

I’ve finally found a tool to assist.  Don’t let the name of the website fool you, Vote For Environment is all about not electing the Conservatives.  The site’s focus is due to the lack of environment policy and leadership the Harperites have shown, but I’ve got plenty of other reasons to not vote Conservative (economic stupidity, broken promises, lies, and on and on).  Punch in your postal code to get the details on your riding, but if you’re really interested in the numbers behind the numbers, and I am, click on the Advanced Prediction Model link on the front page.  They’ve got drill down data to show projections based on the latest polls.  Polls are never a guarantee, as honest polsters will admit, but they’re all we’ve got to work with until the actual election results come in.

And if you live in a riding that’s not a close race?  Well, then you vote your conscience.  In my riding the Conservative incumbent won last election with 51% of the vote.  Based on the numbers I’m seeing from VFE, the polls project 47% this time, so I live in a Conservative stronghold and get to vote for whoever I want.  I don’t have the ability to vote strategically, but I am telling everyone who’s interested to think about the shape of the Canada they want.  Every little bit helps.

Having watched the four-on-one Leaders debate in English, highlights of the French debate, I’ve come to a few conclusions.  Don’t take these as gospel or infer how I’m going to vote.  I honestly haven’t decided yet except that it won’t be Conservative.  Punditry and commentary over the last couple of days has mostly served to reinforce my opinion that it’s all about spin in the media.

Stephen Harper the robot is back.  No emotion, no caring about what other people think or say, no reaction to almost everything.  He spent his time attacking Dion without presenting anything resembling a platform or plan on any issue and only brought up bits and pieces of his governments “record” when something actually roused him enough to defend himself.  Mostly he sat back and let people hit him.

Stephane Dion showed passion and determination whenever someone managed to piss him off.  In those moments, he became someone you could actually listen to make a point.  His handlers should be giving serious thought to how they can keep him pissed off at all times.

Jack Layton spoke very effectively, using his media training to good advantage.  Come out with a quick jab to Harper’s chin, give a quick sound byte on the relevant piece of NDP doctrine, take another swing if there’s time.  In the open discussion, he got the most hits in, mostly on the PM and occasionally on Dion, and all the best ones.  “Where’s your platform? Under your sweater?”

Elizabeth May was a valid voice at the table, had certainly done her homework, and was no less reasonable than anyone else present.  She seemed to delight in pointing out bits of past Conservative idiocy, broken promises, and outright lies.  I’m certainly glad the consortium backpedaled enough to invite her and wonder if she performed well enough to get elected.

Gilles Duceppe.  I have to say that I honestly don’t understand why he’s invited to the English language debate.  I understand why he comes – it’s a free hit, or as many as he can get, against the government as well as everyone else – but I don’t think he should be there.  He’s not running for PM (he said so openly) and the French-Supremist routine doesn’t play at all outside of Québec (not nearly as well in it lately, either), no matter how subtle, other than to make people’s eyes roll.  A regional, separatist party doesn’t belong at the national debate.

The round table format was interesting instead of the traditional podiums, but what I’d really like to see are some one on one debates.  Layton against Harper, Layton against Dion, Dion against Harper.  They wouldn’t need to be two hours long, but they’d certainly be more informative and give us more to work with on deciding who should have the job of running the company.

Eleven days and counting.

As entertaining a tool as they are, polls are actually pretty useless.  I say this not to slander or annoy the people who make their living from them, but because it’s true.  They’re nice to identify trends and they give the pundits something to talk about every single campaign day, but they’re always wrong.  Aside from the ridiculous error bars (Exactly what does +/- 2.9% 19 times out of 20 mean, anyway?  That twentieth time is completely meaningless?  I know the math must bear things out, but come one guys, it’s like you’re admitting that you have no idea what you’re talking about.), they’re not accurate enough.

And what do I mean by that?  Well, you need to read the fine print.  The numbers usually add up to something in the vicinity of 100% which means that everyone they talked to actually thinks they know who they’re going to vote for.  So any given poll needs to be read as “XX% of decided voters intend to vote for party ABC”.  The undecided voters, by some accounts, can be as much as 40% of the total electorate (or the fraction of it that actually goes out to vote).  That’s an awfully big swing vote, don’t you think?

One more thing that bothers me about the math: can you really get an accurate picture of the way things are (even with a 3% error 19 times out of 20), by taking a sample of 1000 or so out of a population of millions of voters?  Seems to be an awfully small fraction to me, if there are, say,  10 million voters (this is very low - almost 15 million people voted in the 2006 election) and you ask a random 1000 of them what they think, you’re only getting one hundredth of a percent of the possible opinions at that moment.  The math may work, but people are more complicated than math.

Lastly, and this almost ignores my previous arguments, none of the polls are detailed enough.  A national picture is nice, but it’s not the whole story.  It’s lovely to be able to estimate seat totals if we all voted today, but it’s not the whole story.  Even going to the provincial level won’t do.  Something that really matters to me is how my riding is shaping up.  Is it a close enough race that I should vote strategically to not get the idiot I don’t want?  Or should I truly vote my conscience because there’s already a clear winner?  Yes, perhaps I should truly vote my conscience regardless of the front runner, but if it really is a tight race, then a little strategic voting could make a huge difference in my riding and the shape of the government across the country.

So my advice of the poling companies is this:  more detail, more clarity, more people surveyed.  I’ll answer a political survey every day if someone calls.  Not a marketing one, though - they can bugger off.

Okay, my tongue is completely not in my cheek for this political post.  There’s been a lot for me to be irritated about this first week of the election campaign with little enough to be impressed by.  I’m not going to hit too many details, but I have one question for all of the leaders except our fair Prime Minister: why the hell aren’t you calling the Conservatives on their record?

There’s a lot of bitching and whining, and not very very much actual debate and discussion.  Platforms are still ridiculously vague and I’ve never been much of a fan of revealing your vision for the country a tiny bit at a time.  I want actual platforms and issues and the candidates to talk about them as well as their own and each others records and accomplishments.  I don’t want mud-slinging and attack adds.

But I guess modern elections aren’t geared to me.

It frightens me a bit that some polls are showing the Conservatives in potential Majority territory, not least because it shows how dysfunctional our system is for a multi-party political environment.  But it heartens me that the Green Party leader, Elizabeth May, has won her bid to be included in the televised leadership debates.  Love them or hate them, the Greens have built the support that should included them and Harper’s childish threat to not show up if she’s there is just one more reason not to vote Conservative.  Is this really the guy we want running the country.  After all, he’s done such a fractacular job so far.

So a Federal election campaign is under way.  Yesterday was Day 3 and while everyone had their own message and the attack adds have started to fly, things are really just getting started.

But what was everyone talking about at work?  Some football player hurt himself during the first game of the season and won’t be playing for the rest of the year.  While I feel for him, whoever he is, in an intellectual way, he’s not even a Canadian football player but for some team south of the border.  There are far more important things going on than football.  Like, oh, the Federal election.

I work in a young industry.  Not the industry itself, but the people who populate it.  At 37, I’m deep into the upper quarter of age in my department, and probably the building.  Average age is probably 25-27.  The pundits are fond of saying that the younger demographics just aren’t interested in politics because it doesn’t speak to them in any meaningful way.  I see that first hand.

Admittedly, I haven’t always been as politically aware as I am now (getting better all the time), but I have always taken the time to get at least a vague idea of what’s going on and to have a something like an informed vote.  I know a lot of people at work who don’t bother to vote because they don’t see the point.

And the rich white guys running the country don’t think the system is broken?  Well, why would they?  It keeps them in power and none of the other problems with it hurt them either.

Apparently, we’re going to have an election in the Great White North very shortly, as if I hadn’t guessed that from all of the kinder, gentler Stephen Harper ads that have been running for the last week or so.  And why have they dressed him up like he stars in some 1950s sitcom?  Sure, Uncle Stevie, we believe you.

The election comes year early, some how contravening the Fixed Election Dates Act in a legal way, at least according to the PM, because Parliament is ‘dysfunctional’.  Parliament is dysfunctional because the Liberals don’t show up to vote and the Conservatives have gotten everything they wanted since they came to power?  This makes sense, somehow?  Uncle Stevie, I’ll have whatever it is you’re smoking.

Back to my point: the Fixed Election Act was supposed to make it impossible for a government to call an election when they think it’s most advantageous, but we trust Uncle Stevie, don’t we?  Transfer formulas, income trusts, corporate welfare, fixed election dates, ethics and transparency, capital gains exemptions, soft wood lumber, access to information, clean air, and on, and on, and on.

I think the motto for the coming election (and how does everyone know that it’s going to be announced, anyway?  Why is every important government announcement known by the media before it’s actually announced?) should be something like: Stephen Harper, leaving no promise unbroken.

I’m going to go out on a limb and make an election prediction: for the first time since World War II, we’re going to have a coalition government.  The Liberals and the Green Party will together gain enough seats for a very slim majority and will celebrate the coalition by announcing the Wedding of Stéphane Dion and Elizabeth May to take place no more than thirty days after election night while Smilin’ Jack looks on enviously and stamps his feet.  And poor old cousin Gilles, well, who cares?

You read it here first.

Does anyone find themselves nostalgic for Paul Martin?  Well, maybe not, but given a real chance I’m sure I would have liked him a lot better than Uncle Stevie.

This is me ignoring the Olympics completely.  Really.  I hope our athletes bring home several plance loads of medals, but I can’t watch.  At this point, it’s the only way I have to punish the IOC for giving the Olympics to a country with China’s human rights record.  Yes, that does make sense.  Make the audience smaller.  This makes the revenues smaller for the CBC and, eventually, trickles back to the IOC.  Yes, I’m probably deluding myself and even if I’m not it’s a very tiny difference and millions of people need to join me for it to have any kind of real impact.

So what are you waiting for?

And please, no one try to say that there’s nothing political about the Olympics.  Until the athletes actually hit the floor, it’s all about politics and I’m not interested in making the Chinese government look good until they start actually being good.  Someday, I hope, but not today.

I’ve had enough. It’s not that I want an election, but I want the partisan hate mongering to stop.

I’d like for the Tories to stop slandering the Liberals every time one of them opens their pie hole and I’d like for the Liberals to stop whining about pretty much everything. I’d like a Conservative leader who doesn’t come across as an control freak, and I’d like a Liberal leader who’s not afraid to tell the government to eat shit and die. Really. I’m tired of the Liberals not turning up to vote for something they wouldn’t support if they did show up because they’re too chicken to fight an election and I’m tired of the Conservatives taunting the Liberals about it.

Does the country really want an election right now? The polls say no, but so what? The country would like a government that actually governs and I don’t think we’ve got one. I’m not sure that would change if we had an election, but at least everyone would shut up about it for a while. Well, once the campaign ended, anyway.

He might still blot out the sun, but did so better for people lower to the ground who had to look around his expanding stomach.

I’m once again not going to rant today.  Don’t seem to do much of that lately.  I’m avoiding all non-political news at the moment - there are too many dead children featured in news stories right now and I find that the most depressing thing.  As far as politics goes, interesting things are happening on both sides of the border, but I’m finding it much harder to be excited about the US presidential race at the moment in light of the stagnant inaction in Parliament on anything of substance whatsoever.  Things are even less exciting at the provincial level, or they might be if anyone actually covered them.

But I’ve got plenty of great podcast material for commutes and other non-writing quiet time.  I’m branching out a bit more lately, reaching further afield.  My latest discovery is the Mr. Deity video podcast, recommended by Steve Eley of Escape Pod fame.  Funniest thing I’ve run across in a long time.  Not really suitable for kids and unfortunately not good for commuting, but it’s hilarious enough to spend the time watching.