Canada holds its Parliamentary Election on Monday, October 19. A Canadian web page has been set up to help voters who desire that the incumbent Conservative Party government lose the election. Strategicvoting.ca has a list of 128 districts in which the vote will be close. The web page has polling data for each of these swing districts, so that voters who want to defeat the Conservative Party goverment can know whether the Liberal Party or the New Democratic Party is the strongest opposition party in that district. See the page here.
All of this wouldn’t be necessary if Canada had instant runoff voting, or approval voting, or proportional representation.
Thanks for sharing this, Richard.
This website is the reductio ad absurdum of the winner-take-all system. It shows quite plainly how this system distorts voters’ preferences.
> All of this wouldn’t be necessary if Canada had instant runoff voting, or approval voting
That is false. IRV can is still quite vulnerable to vote splitting. E.g. in the 2009 mayoral race in Burlington, VT, where a group of Republicans could have gotten a better result by strategically ranking their 2nd favorite candidate in 1st place.
Clay Shentrup
Co-founder, The Center for Election Science