Watch Live: CityNews Tonight Vancouver

Big flaws with strategic voting, warns local mathematician

VICTORIA (NEWS 1130) – Do you know who you’re going to vote for in the provincial election on May 9th? Or is it more of a case of who you are not going to vote for?

Groups pushing for strategic voting when you go the polls want you to avoid casting a ballot for your conscience and, instead, choose any candidate who has a chance to beat the party they don’t want in power.

But a local mathematician says the practice comes with a very big flaw. “They are recommending we make our decision based on polls. The fact of the matter is political polls in Canada just don’t have a good enough track record to justify that,” says Brenda Fine, a math instructor at the British Columbia Institute of Technology.

Fine’s criticisms of strategic voting were recently featured in Maclean’s Magazine. She pulls no punches, claiming proponents have granted political polls a status they simply haven’t earned.

“We just have to go back four years to the most recent BC election where every single poll had the NDP winning by a landslide. We all know how that turned out. Now we have organizations that are asking us to make decisions based on the most recent batch of polls and, as far as I’ve heard, no one has been able to justify why these ones are more reliable than the last ones,” she tells NEWS 1130.

Even if polls proved to be more accurate, Fine would still have reservations about recommending strategic voting.

“It really depends on how many people are willing to vote strategically. The principal behind strategic voting assumes that there are only two groups of people — the ones who like the BC Liberals and the ones who hate them and the ones who hate the Liberals really don’t care whether the NDP or the Greens win. I don’t know how accurate that is. There are certainly several NDP partisans and certainly several Green partisans and there are enough differences between the parties that some people will support one over the other.”

So, if the polls are accurate, if the Greens and NDP are very close, and if there are enough voters who don’t think there’s a big enough difference between those two parties to sway their choice, Fine feels strategic voting could work. “But those are three big ‘ifs’,” she adds.

Fine also points to the record of groups urging strategic voting in federal elections. “They haven’t really defended past results. The the reason is because there’s really not all that much to defend,” she explains. “If we look at the most recent, high-profile strategic voting in 2015, there’s really no indication it helped.”

She suggests it all comes down to misplaced faith in political polls that have proven to be, in many cases, horribly inaccurate. “We have no reason to believe they are better this time around than the ones that were pushed four years ago at this time. Because of that, if we are voting strategically, we might be basing our decisions on numbers that are close to useless.”

You can take part in the exclusive NEWS 1130/PlaceSpeak election poll by clicking here.

Top Stories

Top Stories

Most Watched Today