Stop lying to yourself about strategic voting

With record-high wealth inequality, strategic voting is a call for us to ignore that which will be our demise.

The other day, I saw my first Conservative placard. I had crossed the boundary into the riding next door and there it was, as they all are, on a pole. I had to leave my riding to see it because there is virtually no candidate running in my riding for the Conservatives: our local candidate seems to live 1500 KM away from the riding.

But 338Canada, a poll aggregator, doesn’t care that there is no public information about Chanie Thériault, including information at the Conservative party website. Even though she’s apparently our Conservative candidate, she doesn’t matter because 338Canada relies on regional polling, trends, weighting and formulae to determine that the Conservatives are second place in popularity in my riding.

I think 338Canada is a very useful site to make grand predictions, but not at all useful to get a beat on what’s happening locally. Without any riding-level data, this downtown riding’s polls are skewed rightward by regional polling. It leaves me with the impression that I better vote Liberal if I want to stop the Conservatives.

Strategic voting is the Liberals’ silver bullet. It compresses the entire election — from defense spending to hypocrisy, from population decline to healthcare, from Islamophobia to tariffs, from Trump to Gaza — into a single question: do you want the Conservatives to win? While this has been massaged into being a reasonable way to interact with democracy, in reality, it’s a clever flattening of democratic participation that erases everything that matters and instead, gives you a simple choice to make: blue or no.

On this rhetorical plain, people find themselves sucking it up and choosing “no” — they decide they will vote for the party that has the greatest chance of defeating the Conservatives. And who tells them who has the greatest chance of defeating the Conservatives? Websites like 388Canada.

Of course, this rhetorical plain is a crisis of democracy. How did we get here, to a place where this is not only considered reasonable, but defensible?

For one, this trick is the most powerful tool in the Liberal arsenel. It protects them from scrutiny (because scrutiny becomes impossible when we are voting for someone regardless of who they are). In the history of Canadian politics, strategic voting overwhelmingly benefits the Liberals (with pehaps the Orange Wave in 2011 as the only example of strategic voting mass helping the NDP). Strategic voting is probably the second best reason for why Justin Trudeau abandoned electoral reform (the first being that the Liberals know how to work the system as it is more than how it could be in the future).

If it helps the Liberals so much, how have they managed to convince everyone that this is a reasonable, progressive reaction to the current moment?

It’s because the Liberals, right now, are the party of constrained imagination. They do not benefit from us thinking big, asking for bold ideas or a break with the status quo. Where the Conservatives have much more ability to push Conservative big ideas (like “end public funding of woke research” an idea that is objectively nuts, but certainly bold!).

It’s also because it’s an easy answer to a more complicated problem: why is our democracy so unrepresentative, so ridgid, so unmovable?

Yes, if you look at Canada’s ridings, the wasted votes in a three- or four-way race, add everything up and then look at the results, it looks like strategic voting is a solution. Yes, in the 2021 election, there was just 1.12% that separated the popular votes that both the Liberals and Conservatives received, and the Liberals governed as if they had a majority government. And yes, in some cases, pretending as if we live in a two-party system could deliver a Liberal victory over a Conservative one.

But here’s the sad reality: we cannot fix the electoral system by gaming it. For one, not a single strategic voting website should be sharing any information without local polling, nor should this information be shared until, at least, advanced polling is open. But beyond that, we cannot change anything by voting for the lesser of any evil. If anything, all we do is kick the can down the road, and allow us deal with the side effects of a democratic system that continues to crawl towards being undemocratic, later. This is how fascism takes root — our choices become so violently constrained that we then lash out at the system and choose self destruction (ahem, Harris/Trump election).

We can only fix the electoral system by forcing a government to fix the electoral system. And when a party promises to fix the electoral system (and wins during a campaign where strategic voting was strongly encouraged) and then *they do not do it* we can see that the rot in the system goes far deeper than imagining that a strategic vote is going to save anything.

Politics is not the sum total of a vote during an election. Politics is the sum total of citizen involvement in politics — starting perhaps with the nearly meaningless act of voting and running the gambit through to actually holding office and making decisions. Between these two polls are millions of interventions that citizens need to make if they’re going to force their system to listen to them.

However, there is a deeper lie on which this argument is premised that we must plainly contest: voters are not created equally. In a moment of extreme wealth inequality, the rich have democracy while the poor have strategic voting. If we pretend that access to democracy for 95% of Canadians is the same as the richest 5%, we might be convinced to imagine that strategic voting could work. But political influence does not work like that, and as our country has become less equal than ever before in our history, our democracy is subsequently weakened. “Vote strategically!” is meaningless when corporate Canada pulls the democratuc strings.

All of this is obscured by the chorus of well-intentioned Canadians who insist that if you do not vote Liberal you are de facto voting Conservative. The only world where that’s true is in the world of bullying. No, choosing X isn’t the same as choosing Y, by definition, and if anyone wants to talk about outcome, they better start with the state of our democracy and not with your quiet selection in the voting booth.

Because that’s what strategic voting does: it pressures average people into believing that their votes matter and that they matter so much that you should not vote for your favoured candidate, but instead, for who the chorus as decided is the less worst, based on the sole criteria that they are not (dark) Blue.

Votes though, don’t matter. Forty years of neoliberalism has rendered our votes meaningless. The Liberals and the Conservatives are two sides of the same coin and that coin is in the back pocket of the elites. Our vote will not change that. Our actions beyond the ballot box will. And whether or not in your riding, you decide to vote for the less worst candidate in case the winner wins by a few dozen votes, that doesn’t matter either. Go ahead and do that. But we have to stop lying to ourselves that strategic voting is anything more than Liberal propaganda to make us think so narrowly, that we only see a single tree among the forest of possibilities.