Ontario's snap election is reaching its final day of voting following abysmal early turnout. And the campaign has seen a familiar range of attempts to get various configurations of parties, candidates and voters to engage in strategic voting schemes.
Having written about more than a few of those in the past, I'll thus take the opportunity to provide a quick refresher.
At the level of parties and candidates, I've discussed the principles we should look for in a pre-election pact worth pursuing. And nothing of the sort is in place in the current campaign on a province-wide level - though the few candidates who have elected to step aside have done so in ridings where there's some reasonable hope of making a difference.
And at the level of individual voters, I've also written about how strategic voting plans can range from futile to downright counterproductive depending on the assumptions being used to determine which ridings to target and which candidates to support. And I don't see much reason for confidence that sites whose methodology ranges from "apply a province-wide swing to 2022 results with no regard for local or current conditions" to "back the Libs with virtually exceptions" will provide better guidance than the past failures.
None of the above is to take away from the importance of electing a far better government than the one Doug Ford wants to impose in perpetuity. But the message with the best chance of achieving that end is to mobilize as many voters seeking change as possible - not telling already-disaffected citizens that their votes are wasted if they're not funnelled into a strategic voting scheme.
It should really be called "Tactical voting". In fact, I seem to remember when I was young it often was. The point being that tactics are immediate, short-term things, whereas strategy is about long term measures for achieving overall victory. Tactical voting is about scrambling to save something in an emergency situation, not about building your party's fortunes so as to gain lasting power in the long term. And indeed, the tactics of so-called "strategic voting" tend to if anything cut against longer term strategy.
ReplyDeleteDefinitely a fair point. And if anything, it's the risk of rewarding a cynical party strategy of pushing voters toward tactical voting that makes it so dangerous in the long run.
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