Strategic voting campaign a complicated numbers game

Anyone but the Conservatives.

That’s the goal of a new campaign that aims to get Canadians of all political persuasions to vote together on Oct. 19 to keep the Conservatives from power — a campaign one critic has described as “shots in the dark.”

With 28 days to go before the election, most polls have the three main parties neck-and-neck.

But Canada’s first-past-the-post electoral system is “broken,” the advocacy group Leadnow says, and there is a need for a committed voting bloc to prevent vote-splitting.

“In the last federal election, a majority of people voted for a change in government, but the Conservatives got 100% of the power in Parliament with just 39% of the vote,” the group says on its website.

That allowed Stephen Harper’s government to move ahead with policies that at times sparked strong opposition, like the anti-terrorism Bill C-51.

“Over the last 10 years, the Harper Conservatives have clung to power through fear-mongering and divide-and-conquer politics,” says Leadnow, which, aside from its stated objective, says it is otherwise non-partisan.

The group wants to guide citizens to vote strategically to elect whichever non-Con candidate in their riding has the best chance of winning, regardless of party affiliation.

“This election, we can defeat the Harper Conservatives by uniting people in swing ridings where a few thousand votes will be all that’s standing in the way of another Harper majority.”

While the cry for strategic voting is heard every election, one expert calls such campaigns “shots in the dark.”

First, people find it hard to let go of their long- or strongly held support of a party, or to vote for a party they find otherwise distasteful, Antonia Maioni, a political science professor at McGill University, said in an opinion piece in the Globe and Mail earlier this month.

Even if you could get voters to ignore their hearts and vote with their minds, it’s a numbers game that is more complicated than groups like Leadnow make it sound.

“It takes a considerable understanding of institutional rules and procedures, advanced computational skills and the ability to contextualize many different factors,” she wrote.

Maioni was not immediately available Monday for comment.

As of Monday, the Vote Together campaign had more than 64,000 supporters across the county who have pledged to vote strategically.

But an online pledge is not a binding promise, another expert points out.

“Vote Together suggests that people change their preferences based on previous winners in that riding and ignores what’s happening on the ground now and ignores the ability to get out the vote,” political science professor Jonathan Rose, of Queen’s University, told Yahoo Canada News.

Leadnow says it has identified 72 ridings where voters should co-ordinate their efforts — “swing” ridings the Conservatives won or lost by a small margin last election. There are also several “emerging battleground” ridings where Leadnow’s data show a “large drop” in Conservative support since the last election.

That will make those races interesting to watch but not necessarily decisive, Rose says.

“It’s a great heuristic to demonstrate that some ridings are more competitive than others, but as a guide to how you should vote, as an instrument, it’s flawed.”

A Leadnow spokeswoman disagrees.

“We’re doing something no one has ever done before,” Amara Possian told Yahoo Canada News.

Where past efforts relied on national polls and regional projections, Leadnow will use local polling to identify which non-Tory candidate is the front-runner.

The group is releasing 31 such polls — paid for through crowdfunding — on Wednesday.

It also has more than 2,100 volunteers canvassing door-to-door or by phone, and is harnessing the power of the Internet to connect people and provide information, Possian said.

“Between our riding-level polling and our teams on the ground, I think we have a real shot at making a difference this time.”