c9 | Strategic (sic) Voting

Everybody in Canada goes on and on about strategic voting, which is actually misnamed. It should be called tactical voting, since it's a single tactic contrary to your overall interests, exercised individually, not an overarching strategy commanded centrally and consistently over time.

But anyway. The gist is this: You like Party A, then party B second, then Party C third. A has no chance of winning, so you vote B to ensure that C doesn't win. Most commonly, A=NDP, B=Liberal, and C=Conservative.

The problem is most people forget that a Canadian election is really 308 little elections, and the national polls don't matter. So Joe Canadian thinks A has no chance *nationally*, so he votes B, even though in his riding A would have won if they had his vote. This happened all over last time, to the NDP's detriment (and the Liberals' amusingly, since a stronger NDP would have meant they could form a stable coalition).

So if you must vote "strategically," please make sure you know what you're doing. Learn more here.