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Analysis

PC is Dead!

For a country with a long recent history of voter apathy, in Canada, like most democracies, elections are highly emotional affairs. People vote by their hearts. We can't.

History teaches us that there are great orators among us that can appeal to the public imagination only to betray that public by leading them further away from the very freedom promised. These people often appeal to our most vulnerable sales points: Money; Sex; Religion.

The 41^st Canadian election has taught us many things. We learn from our failures, and this was a big one. This election taught us that even our greatest leaders will divide public support for their own interest even if it means allowing tyrants like Harper a way in. It showed us that most Canadians are willing to fall into a trap rather than take a mathematical approach to preventing this outcome. The last election taught us a great deal about how strategic voting works or doesn't work, and has lead us to totally rethink how we generate our recommendations.

RegressiveConservative.ca has offered a Strategic Voting Guide since the 2006 general election. As far as we know we were the first website ever to do so. Since then we've been imitated. The guide was originally developed last minute as a request from an anonymous user taking our Online Survey. We realized that there was a very real market demand for this tool. The Canadian electoral system of voting for individual candidates doesn't lend itself well to the majority of voters that cast their ballots based only on the national campaign. In this system, a more scientific approach must be taken because the political party that is the major challenger of the Conservative party nationally could well differ from that in your own local district. Thus we created for you a district-by-district guide for your convenience. This guide has always been based only on the returns of the previous election as we do not trust the credibility of gala polls.

Originally the algorithm used to generate recommendations was simple. Eliminate the Conservative candidate and whichever party came in with the highest returns was recommended for that district. A margin was chosen, arbitrarily this was 5000 ballots. For each district if the count between the Conservative and our recommended party was less than this margin, we marked it as a swing district because we saw this as a district that could easily swing between the Conservative and their major opponent.

What we did not take into account until now is that if it was possible for a district to swing between the Conservative and their top contender, it logically would also be possible for the top contender to swing with the second place contender in exactly the same way.

The latest addition of the guide takes this into account. Because the last election clearly demonstrated that it was possible for a district to swing party support, even with a margin greater than 5000 votes, that number has now been doubled to 10000. Further if the top contender received less than 10000 more votes than the second place contender no recommendations is given.

We feel that the changes to the guide are another step forward, just a district-by-district strategic voting is a step forward from strategic voting based only on the national party popularity. Just as the previous guide was flawed, inevitably flaws will surface in this improved guide as well. We will be there to fix them. We are always there for you, the concerned and conscientious voter. If we work together we can keep Mr. Harper's days numbers, if we do make it to see October 19, 2015.

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Last modified Sunday, 04-Sep-2011 23:26:45 MST