Saturday, April 16, 2011

Harper Derangement Syndrome gone wild

www.projectdemocracy.ca

Project Democracy is a tool to help you determine if there is a way to "amp up" your vote and stop a Harper majority. By using a riding by riding election prediction model based on the most up to date public opinion research, we can tell you which Party is best positioned to defeat the Conservative in your riding. Just enter your postal code in the box to the right.
So if I'm understanding correctly, the whole point is that NO platform matters, as long as it's not a Conservative platform.

I know in the 2008 election people were preaching strategic voting to stop Conservatives, and in the end what really happened?  The Conservatives increased their seat count by 18.  Very few Conservatives fell victim to the absurd concept that campaigns don't matter, leaders don't matter, platforms don't matter - as long as the Conservatives are unseated.

I find it absurd that these people would find this somehow democratic.

When I think of democracy, I think of a group of like-minded people getting together and voting for the candidate that best represents their views.  In a two party system, such as the United States, it is very simple - there are only 2 tents, and the extremities know that there's only 2 places to go.  In a multi-party system, there is the freedom to choose the group of people that best represents your views amongst the 5 to 19 that are out there.  It is retail politics to the extreme.  The idea, then, of strategic voting in order to ensure that one party with large appeal loses discounts ALL of the policies of the parties then victimized.  It seeks to assume that if you're not with us, you're against us, and more often than not, that's not the case.

One thing that I would note when reviewing the profile for my riding, is that the voter turnout for the opposition parties has dropped in successive elections.  The NDP candidate can count on a certain number of voters regardless of issues, however the Liberals lost half of their votes from 2006 to 2008.  While part of this might be voter fatigue, it could also be organization or a number of other things.  In my town, the sign war was overwhelmingly Conservative until this weekend, at which point some of the other signs began popping up.  I would point out that instead of working on strategic voting, if all of these people worked to actually get a candidate elected, then they would see their candidates do much better in the election.

While I'm sure that the projections offered up by project democracy are as accurate as any other, suffice to say I won't be visiting the site again.  That's my choice in a democracy as well.

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