Strategic voting. Whose turn is it to borrow your vote?

At the halfway mark in the campaign, various people have been strongly encouraging “strategic voting”, particularly the Liberals as they try to make the (false) sales pitch that “they are the only party other than the Conservatives who can form government, so we should all just vote for them to stop Harper.”  There’s even a web site (built by Liberal supporters, but who’s counting?) saying it’s necessary to vote for the Liberals for action on the environment.

Ah, the memories.  In the last election, I think I recall Jack Layton wanting to “borrow our vote” and Paul Martin wanting us to vote strategically “just this once.”  Or was it the other way round?

I’ve written about so-called strategic voting before, and obviously I’m dead set against the practice since I believe that we should all vote for the party whose core values most agree with our own.  Unless we vote for what we want we will never get it.

The problem with all this is that I can’t ever remember any election in my entire lifetime when voters have not been asked to vote strategically, either by the Conservatives or the Liberals depending on their position in the polls.  Can you?

The perceived need vote strategically, otherwise known as hold-your-nose-and-vote-for-what-you-dislike-to-stop-what-you-hate, is directly related to our backward first-past-the-post voting system.  You know, the one that results in false majorities and even false governments.

So we’re caught in an impossible situation, because the two parties who always urge us to vote strategically are the very ones who gain the most from not changing the system that makes it necessary to even contemplate.  The two parties who will remain in power if we continue to answer this call are the very parties who are committed to not changing the system.

Are we seriously going to buy into these lies once again?  Does anyone seriously imagine a future election where either the Liberals or Conservatives are not asking us to vote strategically for them?

There is only one way to eliminate the perceived need for strategic voting, and that is to stop doing it, so that people who are committed to ridding our country of the yoke of this antiquated voting system are elected to do so.

The Green Party is (the only party) committed to doing just that.  So my strategic vote, my vote for the future of our country, to get rid of a self-perpetuating system that does not work, will be to vote Green.

If you decide that you must vote strategically “just this once more”, well, I can’t and won’t tell you how to vote.  But please remember these words from Albert Einstein,

“The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again expecting a different result.”

The Strategic Voter…