Barnstorming the strategic vote

CBC : Liberal voters in Victoria confused after candidate drops out

"Jean Oliver lives in Victoria and is a long time Green Party supporter. But in advanced polls, she decided to vote strategically, and cast a ballot for the Liberals by ticking Thomas's name.Oliver is worried that less informed voters will be casting ballots Monday based on misinformation."

I worry about that too. Three things to note here :
The "long time Green Party supporter" in the Victoria riding decides to "vote strategically" for the Liberals even though :

1.  the Liberal candidate Cheryl Thomas had withdrawn from the race three weeks before
2.  the Liberals had come in third or fourth place in that riding in the past three elections
3. the voter's first choice, the Green Party, had come second in the byelection one year before and strategic vote proponents projected a similar ranking for this election. 

In the end, 8,489 votes were strategically cast for a Liberal candidate who had dropped out, more than the party received in the previous two elections, one of them a byelection, and more than the margin of difference between the first and second place NDP and Green candidates. 

Graphic from Wikipedia










Manipulating the strategic vote ...

A month ago, "10 ridings where strategic voting might decide the election" at Global News explained how Conservatives in this same Victoria riding would benefit from voting strategically for the Green Party in order to oust the NDP incumbent : 

"Conservative voters could vote strategically, if so inclined, in Victoria, where NDP MP Murray Rankin won a close byelection over the Green Party three years ago.

A Green Party win in Victoria wouldn’t directly help the Conservatives. But it would take away one seat from the NDP—and in an election this close, one riding could make a big difference.

Two months prior, former BC Premier Gordon Campbell’s long-serving chief of staff penned a column entreating people to eschew strategic voting and vote Green Party.
In the last provincial election, the BC Liberals bought a full page ad in the Victoria Times Colonist promoting the BC Green Party leader as a principled alternative to Christy Clark in a blatant attempt to split the vote between Greens and the NDP, then leading in the polls.

All voting is tactical. Strategic voting is the moniker commonly used to mean supporting a candidate other than your sincere preference in order to block a candidate or party you dislike.

Its popularity is helped by a media happily promoting a poll-driven "who's the most popular leader/" horse-race approach which results in voters imagining they vote in their local ridings for some distant party leader.  

In December in the HoC last year, Justin Trudeau voted against an NDP motion to bring in some form of mixed member proportional representation as recommended by the federal Law Commission, stating his personal preference for a ranked ballot system that would - he did not say - mostly benefit the Liberals. He then campaigned on ending the First-Past-the-Post system that just gave his party a majority government by the same percentage the Cons got theirs last time round. 

We'll see. Electoral reform explained through Lego

Update : Kai Nagata : Strategic voting didn't defeat Harper. Voter turnout did.
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Saanich-Gulf Islands - perhaps not quite Ground Zero after all

Saanich Gulf Islands in 2008 is widely perceived by many to be "ground zero for election fraud in Canada", as Elizabeth May puts it. Not only did the perps successfully pull it off but Elections Canada's botched investigation demonstrated it could be done in future elections with impunity.

The scam comes in two parts. (Wet coasters may want to skip this bit.)
1)Robocalls
Environmentalist and SGI Lib candidate Briony Penn lost in the 2008 election when robocalls from the US spoofed the NDP campaign number and encouraged SGI voters to vote for the NDP candidate who had very publicly dropped out 3 weeks earlier but too late to have his name removed from the ballot. Some 3700 voted for him and Con MP/TarSands Minister Gary Lunn bested Penn by a 2,625 vote margin. 

The alternative theory is that pissed off NDP voters voted for their candidate anyway to spite the Liberals who outed him for inappropriate skinny dipping and body painting behavior 12 years earlier in 1996, causing him to drop out of the race. 

“The Liberal Party did that,” the director of communications for the Liberals B.C. campaign Brad Zubyk said, though he denied deserving credit himself. “It's all public domain. Quite frankly, we don't apologize for it. None of this is particularly hard to find.”

Either way, Elections Canada closed their investigation after failing to determine whether anyone "had actually been influenced in their vote because of the purported telephone call", and because "evidence of the actual source of the calls and the person or persons who made them would be required."   
Same reasons EC gave for concluding their election fraud investigation in 2011. 

2) Third party advertisers. 
Your previously unheard-of go-to people when a campaign has maxed out their allowable EC spending limit and there's a need for a last minute proxy ad buy in local papers and radio before Election Day, after which they vanish in a puff of smoke til next election.
Of the 50 odd third-party groups registered with Elections Canada in 308 ridings across Canada in 2008, five were registered in Saanich-Gulf Islands. The first four on the list below all shared the same financial agent and registered under the law firm address and phone number of Bruce Hallsor - former Canadian Alliance Party candidate, Gary Lunn supporter, and Conservative riding association VP . 

• Economic Advisory Council of Saanich  - Patricia Trottier, sole financial contributor, c/o Bruce Hallsor’s law office at 800-1070 Douglas St., Victoria
• Dean Park Advocacy Association  - Ralph Bodine, contributors Ralph and Linda Bodine c/o Hallsor law office
• Saanich Peninsula Citizens Council  - Dana Dickinson c/o Hallsor law office
• Citizens Against Higher Taxes  - Lynda Farmer c/o Hallsor law office
• Common Sense Advocacy of Victoria  - Donna Evans

Before Andrew MacLeod at The Tyee added Citizens Against Higher Taxes to his list, there were only four on it. At that time Hallsor told him that while Dickinson of Saanich Peninsula Citizens Council :

"did some advertising in 2006 - the other three were new for this election."

Not that new.

In 2006 in Victoria - the riding right next to SGI - crown prosecutor and Con MP-hopeful Robin Baird got some election advertising help from Common Sense Advocacy of Victoria. On their January 2006 Elections Canada Third Party Advertising Report, Common Sense Advocacy lists Donna Evans as financial agent and the address is once again ... wait for it ...   Bruce Hallsor's law office.  

Donna Evans is married to Robert Evans, Gary Lunn's fundraising chair for Saanich-Gulf Islands electoral district association. Lunn's VP was Bruce Hallsor and his riding president was then-Environment Minister Jim Prentice's sister.   
MacLeod :

"Robert Evans is the vice-president of Community Marine Concepts, which is seeking a license from the province to occupy 2.63 hectares of Victoria Harbour with a marina for 80-foot to 120-foot yachts.  The company is working on the proposal with Alberta-based WAM Development Group. Getting the license requires approvals from various provincial and federal agencies ... Hallsor has registered to lobby on behalf of WAM."

and is still the registered lobbyist for WAM in 2015 : 

• Application of transport regulations related to use of the Victoria Harbour

G&M : "... when a minister gets lobbied by his own campaign manager, who is acting for his fundraiser, it certainly looks bad. "

Likewise, when local opponents to the mega-marina ask the riding president's brother, the Environment Minister, for an environmental assessment and are refused - also not good.

In 2006 Bruce Hallsor formed the BC Conservative Club ; by 2009 he was also the BC Liberal constituency association president for Victoria – Beacon Hill. In a treatise I can no longer find online, Hallser argued that federal conservatives should vote for BC Liberals.  

It's a small, small, small LibCon world out here in BC. A lot of it is about money. I reckon the 'ground zero' elections shenanigans event horizon goes back further than most of us can remember.

Thursday Update : Deep Climate : Conservative Democracy Deficit on Vancouver Island
A very thorough and detailed look that I had read four years ago and forgotten about.
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Gordon Campbell to "axe the tax" ?

When Gordon Campbell won the BC election by 4% of the vote a scant 10 days ago, the headline at DeSmogBlog read : "Carbon Tax Wins : Cheap Politics Loses"

Just prior to the election, David Suzuki appeared on the front page of the G&M warning of dire consequences "If Liberal Leader Gordon Campbell goes down because of [the NDP's] axe the tax campaign".

G&M again : "Environmentalists vow to punish NDP for plan to dismantle B.C.'s carbon tax"
"The David Suzuki Foundation, the Pembina Institute and Forest Ethics jointly stated that "thousands of jobs in the green economy will be lost, and the province will lose its position as an environmental leader if the (first North American carbon) tax is dropped."

From the webpage of Plutonic Power, environmental activist Tzeporah Berman chimed in : "There is no question that environmentalists should be punishing the NDP..."

The environmental movement promptly blew up between "environmental" supporters of Campbell and his useless carbon tax, versus those like Raif Mair and Alex Morton who argued that the rest of Gordo's environmental policies included the privatizing of BC rivers in the run-of-river goldrush, open-cage fish farms, the end of the 35-year oil-tanker moratorium, Enbridge pipelines running across BC from Alberta to Kitimat to deliver tarsands oil to foreign markets, coalbed methane development, offshore oil drilling, and the return of grizzly bear trophy hunting.
Group 2's ideas, you will not be surprised to learn, did not get the same solid rotation afforded Gordo by his endorsers at the G&M and Canwest.

Whatever. The damage was done and Gordo the environmental premier got his 4% win.

So it's a bit much to read in yesterday's Province that with the election under his belt, Gordo is now considering "axing the tax" himself in favour of the US cap-and-trade system :

"Campbell now says he might strangle his own carbon-tax baby in the cradle.
In one of the great under-reported stories of the B.C. election, Campbell revealed the carbon tax will be reviewed in 2012 and might be frozen in place at 7.24 cents per litre of gas and not rise any further.

But wait: Isn't the whole point of a carbon tax to keep jacking it up every year until people stop burning those evil fossil fuels? Even Campbell's own climate-change adviser, economist Mark Jaccard, says the tax must rise to 24 cents a litre and higher over a decade and beyond to be effective.
But Campbell told me that may not be necessary, if cap-and-trade does the same job
anyway.

The irony here is that this is exactly what NDP Leader Carole James was arguing when she promised to scrap the carbon tax in favour of cap-and-trade.
She was vilified for doing it while Campbell was hailed as some kind of visionary."

Suckered again by Liberal "environmentalists".
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Way to go, Tyee!

The Tyee has been running a fundraiser since Monday to hire an extra reporter to cover election issues. The donation form includes the question "Which election issue matters most?" , allowing contributors to directly fund reporting on the issues most important to them. Now closing in on $9000, the graph represents the per dollar interest in each category.
Not bad for an alternative online paper with the originally modest goal of raising $5,000 by April 14th!

Well done, Tyee. Gord knows we need a stronger alternative to the Gordo shmooze-fest foisted on us each election by the two CanWest dailies - the Sun and the Province - and Tyee coverage of local issues is always excellent. The categories Corruption and Environment are leading so far, highlighting reader interest in the investigation into the sale of BC Rail and the campaign to Save Our Rivers from Gordo's privatization of hydro power.

That said, I'd much rather see a greater focus - with a graph to match - on each category ranking per voter rather than the per dollar they are using as illustrated above. Tyee publisher David Beers has promised to produce one after Chrystal Ocean of Challenging the Commonplace brought it to his attention in Tyee comments.

So go send them a few bucks and help the Tyee reframe the conversation before the May 12th election. My money's on Voting Reform.
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