Vote Skew in the Canadian Election

[thespoom]

A foreword: My math here may be horribly bad, feel free to correct me.

Updated 19/10/08: My math was, indeed, bad. Fixed Conservative ratio.

Comments

[sailorfrag]

I found it interesting to compare the gap between NDP and Liberal.

I wonder if all the people that wanted NDP but thought voting Liberal would be more strategic had switched, if it would have gone differently (NDP as the opposition?)

[thespoom]

I hate the idea of "strategic voting". If you're worried that your vote well and truly will not count if you're not voting for a party that has a chance of winning in your riding, that's a sign of a broken system, not that you should choose the lesser of two evils when you could be choosing someone who more closely fits your views.

Incidentally, I voted NDP.

[sailorfrag]

I vote strategically sometimes (I'd prefer to vote for NDP, but only did once out of the three times I voted), preferring pragmatism over idealism (I prefer a non-conservative government more than stating my actual preferences on principle).

However, I completely believe that the current system is broken. When Ontario was thinking of changing voting systems, the new one was broken too (arguably more broken under certain circumstances), but I wanted a switch to take place just so that there was precedent for getting it changed ever, so hopefully another change (to a less-broken system) would be possible sooner.

Side note: pretty much every voting system is broken one way or another. The ones that I think are mostly fair also end up being too confusing to explain (or confusing to use, but confusing to use is actually a valid reason for rejection), so people will just revert to broken-but-familiar. Really, I think the current system is pretty confusing too but it's familiar. Sigh.