Photo via Saskatchewan’s Own Tornado Hunter, Greg Johnson (https://twitter.com/TornadoGreg/status/648325988191891457/photo/1)
Watched some of the rare supermoon lunar eclipse with Shea and Pace tonight. Pretty cool, especially considering the last time it happened was 1982 and it won’t happen again until 2033!
In the current Canadian context, this usually means voting for a Liberal or NDP candidate to defeat a Conservative. VoteTogether.ca has just released poll results from 31 swing ridings with their recommendation on which party to support to maximize the chances of defeating the Conservative candidate.
Advantages of Strategic Voting
Many “winners” in our first past the post system end up winning with fewer votes than the combined totals of the other candidates in the same riding. This is especially frustrating in ridings where a Conservative might win by a few hundred votes when the third place party gets thousands.
Well-established patterns may exist in certain ridings where, for example, there’s been a long trend of the NDP or Liberals coming in second to a Conservative candidate and the idea is that flipping enough of the third party voters to the second place candidate could topple the usual winner.
With our increasing use of technology, it’s easier to get the word out to people to encourage strategic voting in ridings that are projected to be really close
Disadvantages of Strategic Voting
Different election issues can cause voters to change their longstanding patterns as we’ve seen with the unexpected breakthroughs for the NDP in both Quebec and Alberta in recent elections.
Demographics and numerous other factors will change in ridings between every election which means you can’t use historical patterns to determine what might happen in current elections.
Polling is also an imperfect science and often, the “polling” being cited by strategic voting advocates is nothing more than looking at the results of the last election and not much more.
The ABC movement (Anybody But Conservative) neglects to acknowledge that the NDP & Liberals are also very different and not-at-all interchangeable. For example, I’d struggle to vote for the Liberals, even if I knew they were the 1st or 2nd place party in my riding, given their support of Bill C-51. (Luckily I don’t have to do that but would encourage any Liberal or Green Party supporters in Regina-Qu’Appelle to vote Nial!) 😉
You know that experience when you learn a new word or buy a new vehicle or whatever and after never noticing it before, you suddenly see it everywhere?
I had a recent experience except it was with a YouTube rap star. A friend of mine in the States who’s a teacher posted a pic with “Lil Dicky” who had returned to his alma mater where my friend teaches. Then I saw Mr. Dicky’s new video was trending on Facebook’s News Feed. Then I saw him on my Reddit front page.
In our “viral” age, this isn’t unusual for memes to come into your consciousness all at once but I just thought it was cool that this one started with a pic posted by a buddy.
I haven’t done a navel-gazing post for awhile so I thought it’d be interesting to list which of my blog posts have had the most views during this year along with the date that they were originally published…
September 2006 is the only month that hits my Top 10 list twice.
I think a common theme to probably half of these posts is people looking for unique information that’s hard to find elsewhere online – from how to make a drink that’s fairly unique to the prairies to how to write a eulogy for an uncle to facts about a certain RV model to insight into a specific University program
Not one “Theme” post makes the list – no Music Monday, Throwback Thursday, Friday Fun or Saturday Snap. If I were trying to make this blog more popular or including ads, I’d probably have to look seriously at doing away with those theme days.
