Don't let a flawed strategy steal your vote

Strategic voting may seem like a tool to combat a flawed system, but in reality, it is just another symptom of our elections' flaws

As we approach the upcoming provincial election, the overwhelming likelihood of a Conservative majority is pushing many students to consider voting strategically.

While the sentiment behind strategic voting — to avert the victory of a least-preferred party by voting for whichever other candidate has the best chance of winning — makes sense in certain circumstances, strategic voting is a critically flawed strategy that students should reconsider.

While many progressive organizations, such as unions, parties and community organizations, throw their weight behind strategic voting each election, there is little historical evidence to suggest they gain anything from subordinating their values to vote against Conservatives rather than for their preferred candidates.

As Larry Savage, a Brock University professor who has studied strategic voting, suggested in a 2022 article, there are a number of flaws with the strategy that make it an almost useless approach.

The first flaw he outlines is the inconsistency of tactical voting recommendations. Organizations often struggle to agree on which candidate to endorse as the strategic vote. Because of a critical lack of riding-level polling for most elections, recommendations can often contradict one another.

He also suggests that strategic voting campaigns often struggle to adapt to mid-campaign shifts in polling, leading to outdated or incorrect recommendations.

One strategic voting website's mishandling of Hamilton Centre, an important riding for many McMaster students, provides a clear example of strategic voting's issues. In making recommendations on how to vote in Hamilton-Centre, Smartvoting.ca demonstrated a number of flaws inherent in strategic voting.

This election for Hamilton-Centre is unprecedented in the riding’s 18-year history. For every election since the riding was recreated in 2007, the NDP candidate has won. From 2007 to 2022, this candidate was Andrea Horwath, who became the Ontario NDP leader in 2009. After the last provincial election, Horwath resigned as party leader to run for Hamilton mayor and Sarah Jama was elected MPP under the NDP for Hamilton Centre.

Now, after being removed from the Ontario NDP, Jama is running as an independent against the NDP’s newly declared candidate, Robin Lennox. Both candidates have ties to the McMaster community.

With no apparent direct polling at the riding-level, SmartVoting.ca has made recommendations for Hamilton Centre’s election. Their recommended strategic vote, possibly due to a lack of direct polling at the riding level, has now changed at least twice — from NDP to Sarah Jama and now back to NDP — which gave Jama enough time to proclaim herself in one Instagram post as the “best chance to make sure we keep this riding safe from Ford.”

It is particularly telling that according to SmartVoting’s own projection, the Conservatives stand no chance of winning Hamilton-Centre. Yet, instead of suggesting people vote based on their beliefs, they made a recommendation anyway. This choice is not an indictment of SmartVoting itself, but an indictment of the systemic flaws of strategic voting as a whole.

As shocking as it is for me to find myself agreeing with Liberal leadership, former Ontario Liberal leader Steven Del Duca was right in the last election when he chose to run not as a “strategic choice” against Doug Ford, but on his party’s values and ideas. Strategic voting, similar in spirit to the often-proposed merger of Ontario Liberals and the Ontario NDP, is, as prominent Liberal Tim Murphy suggested about the proposed merger, a victory of shallow tactical politics over principles and values.

Strategic voting is symptomatic of a fundamentally flawed electoral system — a winner-takes-all approach that, for many, has turned voting on beliefs and principles into voting based on negative opinions of a right- or left-wing boogeyman. SmartVoting itself recognizes its purpose — but not the doom-and-gloom anti-Conservative rhetoric that fuels its use — as symptomatic of our first-past-the-post system and fails, like many other strategic voting services, to centre advocacy for electoral reform.

Change-minded students should vote based on their genuine beliefs. We stand a far better chance of changing the results of the provincial election by actually voting for our values than by a few of us voting strategically.

And whoever your MPP ends up being, write to them to demand electoral reform.