In his Vancouver-area riding, NDP candidate Peter Julian is calling on those who would normally vote Liberal or Green to vote for him.
He claims the Conservatives are counting on a split vote, and that supporting his candidacy will help ensure Pierre Poilievre doesn’t take power.
What Juilan is saying is that those Liberal or Green supporters should consider strategic voting. It’s a voting strategy that’s been employed in elections before, and being called upon again in this federal election.
But what is it? And is it effective? CBC News explains.
What is strategic voting?
Strategic voting occurs when someone who, instead of voting for the party of their choice, decides to vote for another party in order to block a third party from gaining office.
“If I prefer the NDP [and] that’s my sincere preference, but I vote for the Liberals to stop the Conservatives, then the common phraseology is that I didn’t vote sincerely. I voted strategically for the Liberals to prevent the Conservatives from winning,” explained Christopher Cochrane, an associate professor of political science at the University of Toronto.
But other examples include Liberals voting for a strong NDP candidate to stop the Conservatives in a particular riding if they feel the Liberal candidate has no shot of winning.
As well, a Conservative might also vote for an NDP candidate to stop the Liberals from taking the seat.
What are the challenges of strategic voting?
For strategic voting to be effective, there needs to be some kind of data about voter preferences in that riding.
Based on electoral history, it may be easier to predict those preferences in some ridings.
But while there’s often an abundance of national polling data for a federal election or provincial polling data for a provincial election, polling data for a specific riding can be hard to come by.
When it exists, it’s also often less reliable.
“One of the big challenges in our electoral system with strategic voting is that people often look at national-level polls when they decide whether and how to vote strategically, when what ultimately matters is the local results,” Cochrane said.
That could lead to a situation, Cochrane said, where the local NDP candidate is most likely to beat the Conservative candidate — but voters instead move toward the Liberals because they’re more likely than the Conservatives to form government.
“Then you could have in that district the exact opposite effect of what the strategic voters are aiming for.“
What are the pros and cons?
Certainly the advantage of strategic voting is that it could help keep a voter’s “worst-case scenario” of a particular leader and party from taking power.
However, such strategic votes also could have long-term consequences.
If New Democrat supporters abandon the party to vote Liberal, the resulting poor showing could mean the NDP has official party status in Parliament — leaving it severely underfunded as a result.
“They’re not able to get their message out. People stop donating to them,” Cochrane said. “Then the New Democrats could cease to exist as a viable party.”
What role does strategic voting play in an election?
Andre Blais, a political science professor emeritus at the Université de Montreal who has studied strategic voting, said research shows that around five per cent of people vote strategically in Canadian elections.
Perhaps not surprisingly, those who are more likely to vote strategically are those with weaker voter preferences, he said.
“If you like the NDP but you don’t like it that much, you’re more likely to entertain the possibility of voting for another party,” he said.
In most elections, Blais said, there might be just a handful of ridings where strategic voting can change the outcome.
“I suspect that there will be very, very few cases where it sort of makes the difference,” he said. “What we do know, I think, [is] that it’s very unlikely to be decisive in most constituencies.”
