Strategic voting, vote swapping, and who elected that guy anyway?

Strategic voting is a factor in any election, and it's certainly been part of the Canadian election discourse for as long as I can remember. But it seems to much more front and centre this election than ever before. Partly, I suspect, that's due to our having had a couple of minority governments in a row -- with an election that feels perilously close, people are much more worried about ensuring the success of their preferred party or preventing a hated party from getting a majority than they are when the outcome seems inevitable. Partly, too, I suspect it's a spillover from the proportional representation debate. It's become clear that we're not getting prop rep anytime soon, so people are more concerned than ever about how to maximize their vote.

Is strategic voting a good idea? As with almost anything else electoral, the answer depends on a slew of factors: how strongly you feel about your preferred party, especially as compared with the party you'd vote strategically for; the race in your particular riding; how strongly you are opposed to another party; how you feel about the local candidates.

There are certainly arguments against voting strategically. Not least, there's the fact that each vote is worth a few dollars in funding for your electoral party of choice. So if you're a small-party supporter considering making a strategic vote, you might want to consider making a small donation to your preferred small party to try and offset the financial damage associated with losing your vote. But it's not just financial damage; small parties that don't get enough votes don't ever become big enough parties to have an influence on the country as a whole. And if you give your vote to a larger party that doesn't quite represent your views, then you're certainly not encouraging the large parties to change or to take into consideration the issues that matter to you.

But let's not forget that voting is not only about expressing your true essential beliefs -- it's also about choosing your representatives, the people who will govern the country. And you should be realistic about what effect your vote will actually have. Will it help elect a reasonably good MP belonging to a reasonably good party that isn't 100% in synch with you, or will it be just one more vote against the guy who gets in because no one opponent was able to muster enough votes? Unfortunately, there's no way to know the outcome before you go and vote, so we all have to make our decisions based on incomplete information.

What's clear to me, though, is that there's something not quite right about our electoral system that's prompting these ongoing discussions about how to best vote. I don't know if prop rep is _the_ solution, but it seems that some variation on that theme should be at least part of the solution. We shouldn't be stuck chosing between voting our conscience/throwing our vote away and holding our nose/voting for the least bad alternative.