Strategic voting campaigns building momentum unlike those of previous elections

This election is going to be different, many Canadians are saying — and they might be right.

Previous efforts to abolish Canada’s “first-past-the-post” (FPTP) system never got very far, but the “Anyone but Harper” battle cry has been particularly loud this time around: The Facebook page “Anyone but Harper Conservatives in 2015” has been chiming in since before the last election. Another campaign, called VoteSwapping.ca, is encouraging voters to pair up across ridings to elect the best-chance non-Con candidate in both. An Ontario farmer even plowed the message into his field.

Strategic voting campaigns, in particular, have gained momentum unlike that seen in previous elections.

FPTP — which gives a House of Commons seat to the candidate in each riding with the most votes — is “broken,” says advocacy group Leadnow, 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.

Leadnow aims to guide citizens to elect whichever non-Conservative 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.”

As of Tuesday, the Vote Together campaign had more than 87,000 supporters across the country who have pledged to vote strategically. Nearly 5,000 volunteers have been canvassing door-to-door and by phone for weeks, and organizers have harnessed the power of the Internet to connect like-minded voters.

“I don’t think it’s been tried like this before,” Leadnow spokeswoman Amara Possian told Yahoo Canada News. “People keep saying it’s been tried before and hasn’t worked. This campaign is different because of the information we’re providing, the volunteer resources going into it. We’re mobilizing people to talk to each other to have face-to-face conversations that can actually have an impact on election day.”

At least one expert thinks they have a shot.

“I think the conditions are, on the one hand, favourable in the sense that there are a number of ridings where a small shift in voting can make a difference in seats,” University of British Columbia political science professor Richard Johnston said.

Leadnow focused on 72 “swing” ridings the Conservatives won or lost by a small margin last election. Out of their efforts emerged 31 ridings where local polling data — which they paid for through crowdfunding — has shown a clear opposition front-runner. The group released its first 16 recommendations over the weekend.

Johnston agrees that Leadnow’s approach is novel.

“Whether there’s the possibility to engineer it is the question. In a three-way race we could be talking about quite a small difference among the parties — and the smaller the difference, the less able any survey is to detect it and identify it correctly, so there’s a problem.”

Another campaign tried to surmount that problem using more data.

Strategicvoting.ca says five million votes in 57 electoral districts were “wasted” in the last election because of the “progressive vote divide.”

“In these districts, the combined progressive vote (CPV = Liberals plus NDP plus Green) would have been greater than that of the total support for the Conservative government. Five million Canadians went to the poll and cast a ballot to make a statement and ended up changing nothing.”

For instance, the group says the NDP received a total of 4,512,411 votes but just 103 seats: 2,378,832 votes were effective, so 47 per cent of votes were “wasted.” With strategic voting the party would have won 125 seats — good enough to lead a minority government.

Using not only publicly available constituency-level opinion poll data but also 2011 election results compared against projections by website threehundredeight.com and historical voting data and trends, Strategicvoting.ca identified 128 swing ridings and made a recommendation of who to vote for in each one.

Another last-ditch effort among the Anyone but Harper crowd is taking a different angle, putting the onus on the leaders of the other three major parties to co-operate.

Recognizing that the three are more alike than not, the signatories to the Change.org petition are asking Mulcair, Trudeau and Green stop attacking one another, encourage strategic voting and, most significantly, pull their candidates from ridings where they have no chance.

“If the progressive parties cannot co-operate enough to keep Harper out of power, the three of you will be remembered for letting down the people of Canada. You will have allowed us to drift for four more years out of democracy and pluralism and into fear, surveillance, militarism, xenophobia, and austerity.”

Created on Oct 2, the petition had more than 14,000 supporters as of Tuesday morning.

History says the pace of electoral reform is glacial. But even if the strategic voting campaigns don’t work, this may be the last first-past-the-post election anyway: the leaders of the other three major parties have all pledged to change FPTP should they form the next government.