Spoiler Alert

Elizabeth May and Ralph Nader have a lot in common. They're both from Connecticut, they've both run for leader of their respective countries on the Green Party ticket, and they've both been accused of stealing votes from their liberal counterparts. Their opinion of these 'stolen' votes, however, apparently differs.

A refresher for anyone who fell alseep in Grade 10 Career Studies and forgot to wake up before Civics started: Canada has 308 Electoral Districts spread out across the country, each with a weight of 1 in parliament. These districts are sized by population, so some (like my riding of Ottawa Centre) are only 35km², while others, such as Kenora (321 716km²), are bigger than the United Kingdom. Whichever party wins the most ridings forms the government. If no party gathers a majority of the ridings, then they must contend with a minority government and seek the support of the Members of Parliament sitting from other parties lest their government fall.

Things become dicey when you look at the number of candidates in each riding. There can be as many as five, six, seven or more candidates, often four or five from a 'legitimate' party (sorry, NeoRhinos). A party can win a riding with less than 25% of the vote if it is evenly divided. (If you consider that only 59% of Canadians voted, this equates to less than 15% of the population needed to get your 1/308th share of the Canadian government.) Under these circumstances, the issue of vote splitting will invariably arise. Stephen Harper is the Prime Minister with only 37.65% of the popular vote. Multiply this by the 59% voter turnout, and less than one quarter of our population actually supported him. So the questions arise: Should I vote for the party I actually want to win? Or should I vote for the party most likely to stop the Conservatives? These questions are not new, and are not unique to Canada.

The American system, so I gather, is slightly different. Each state has a ballot with Presidential candidates, and whichever candidate gets the most votes wins that state. Each state is worth points based on population, and whichever candidate gets the most points overall, wins (kind of like basketball). This scenario again leave the door open for vote stealing. Looking at the infamous butterfly ballots from Florida's 2000 debacle, there are ten Presidential candidates, and even a Write-In spot (...if I get enough of my buddies to vote for me, then just maybe...). With ten candidates to contend with, the vote can be well split again, but the difference being that there are only two 'legitimate' parties (sorry, Boston Tea).

In the 2008 Canadian Federal Election the Green party garnered 937 613 votes, but no MPs. Some would argue that this represents almost 1 million wasted votes, of which the majority theoretically would have gone to the Liberals (they were in cahoots, after all). This scenario likely cost the Liberals seats, and therefore sway in parliament. Elizabeth May was heavily criticized near the end of the campaign for appearing to suggest that in some ridings Green supporters would be better to vote Liberal to defeat the Conservatives. This suggestion may have cost the Greens votes, government funds, and David Chernushenko.

Ralph Nader has faced similar circumstances in drawing support away from the Democrats. Due to its 25 Electoral Votes (points), whoever won Florida in the 2000 American Federal Election would become the President. It clearly didn't matter who got more overall votes or anything like that. After numerous debacles including shoddy reporting, ambiguous ballots, and hanging chad, the Supreme Court decided that George W. Bush had won Florida, edging out Al Gore by less than the number of people who voted for Nader. (The same is true about New Hampshire.) Theoretically Nader supporters would have supported Gore, and some Republicans even ran pro-Nader campaigns in an attempt to split the vote. Nader, however, has continued to rebuke suggestions of strategic voting, maintaining in his differences from and opposition to the Democrats.

So whose strategy is the best use of your vote? The problem with the debate is that there's no concensus. If nobody voted strategically, and instead voted for the party they wanted to win most, then the Greens and New Democrats would undoubtedly pick up votes and perhaps even seats at the expense of the Liberals. At the same time, if everybody voted strategically, and voted for the party most likely to defeat the Conservatives, then the Liberals would invariably gain votes, and likely even seats, with enough new votes to topple some Conservative candidates (They Conservatives won Kitchener-Waterloo by 17 votes). As it stands now, nobody is really sure which option is best, so everybody does their own thing. This only does the one thing that everybody can agree they don't want, which is benefit the Conservatives.

But there can really only be one answer, and that is to vote for the party that you want to win the election. If Ralph Nader were a Democrat, he wouldn't run against them. If you support Nader, why would you vote for his opponent? He even gave John Kerry the chance to encorporate some of his key issues into Kerry's failed 2004 Presidential campaign. When Kerry failed to do this, Nader went electioneering. By even garnering votes, these candidates are bringing the issues important to them into the spotlight. Elizabeth May participated in, and some argue won, the leaders debates this year. If nobody have voted Green in 2006, then Green issues would not have been represented this way. The Reform Party didn't win a seat in 1988, but increased their votes tenfold by 1993, claimed 52 seats in parliament, and in an ironic twist split the Right-Wing vote and vaulted Jean Chretien to a staggering majority. Without the third and fourth party options, our politics would be a bland choice between the lesser of two evils, and small party supporters would end up voting for parties who didn't represent them. That is no way to see democracy in action.

RM