Voting Liberal won’t make your vote count
Haven’t posted in a long time now. Let’s try getting on the posting wagon again…
I’ve been helping with the Green Party this election and something I hear time and time again from people is this :
“I’d vote Green, but my vote would be wasted – so I’m voting Liberal.”
While I understand the sentiment – this is pure logical fallacy. If your vote was to count – that would mean that your vote would have to be decisive in winning the riding for the Liberals by breaking a tie.
It’s never a tie.
The only way your vote would count in the “I’m voting Liberal” scenario is if your vote was decisive – that is – if the vote count without your specific vote was a tie.
To reiterate my point – it’s never a tie. Your vote never actually counts in a plurality voting system because it’s never a decisive vote. Your single vote is never the one that puts a candidate into office. So your vote would still be wasted.
Vote with your conscience, not with bad math.
Just to beat a dead horse one more time – this is a good example of why people should really want proportional representation. People constantly complain about the quality of their politicians, but we institute an electoral system where voters have a perceived incentive to vote for a candidate who does not have the same interests as the voter.
Or more simply – yeah – the politicians we have in office may suck – but we keep voting them in.
Having proportional representation has one very clear benefit – all votes are decisive*. Each and every vote contributes to the allocation of seats for the party that most closely aligns itself to your preferences.
This is a good thing – it means that leaders must provide benefits to a larger percentage of the population to maintain power. It means that in minority governments – there is incentive for parties to co-operate and compromise to push legislation through, and there is a disincentive to simply call an election in the hopes of winning a majority.
*Ok – not all votes if you have some minimum floor for the percentage of votes nationally, but this is dramatically better than what we have now.
arg.. I just wrote a long comment and hit backspace by accident and lost it all.
Summary: nobody says “my vote wouldn’t count” thinking that there will be a win/lose situation by one vote and that decisive vote being theirs. “Gerry chose the winner!” That’s crazy talk and taking the literal meaning waaaay out of context.
Scenario: Next election Greens get 4% more votes. Liberals lose some really close ridings. They could have won those if people had voted Liberal and not Green. Done. That’s it. And there’s no guarantee… it’s still a “could have” situation. It does illustrate the phrase in question though.
Also, sometimes you aren’t necessarily voting for who you want to win, but voting against somebody you really, really don’t want to win.
As for MMP… we lost. The general voting public are retarded.