How to Vote

In honour of the upcoming election, a review.

1. Of the parties running candidates in your riding, decide which one has the best platform that comes closest to meeting your needs and your vision of the country (hereafter the Best Party). Then decide which one has the worst platform that is furthest from meeting your needs and deviates the most from your vision of the country (hereafter the Worst Party). You are judging the parties as a whole, not the individual candidates in your riding. Assess each party individually without regard to possible strategic voting - that comes later.

2. Based on your own needs and your own vision for the country, decide whether it is more important to you that the Best Party win, or that the Worst Party does not win.

3. If it is more important to you that the Best Party wins, vote for the Best Party. If not, continue to the next step.

4. If it is more important to you that the Worst Party does not win, assess the Worst Party's chances of winning in your riding.* Not in the country as a whole, just in your riding. If you feel that there's too great a risk of the Worst Party winning in your riding, vote for the party most likely to defeat the Worst Party. If you feel the risk of the Worst Party winning in your riding is acceptably low, vote for the Best Party.

*Here are some suggestions for ways to assess sentiment in your riding:

- The Election Prediction Project
- Lawn signs
- General sentiment gleaned from talking to people
- Letters to the editor, if there's a local newspaper which has the majority of its leadership living in the same riding. This won't work in major cities, but it will work in smaller towns and cities
- Historical election results in your riding.
- Contact your local reference librarian and have them help you find out if any polls have been done for your specific riding.
- Extrapolations from seat predictions. This depends on the kind of predictions available, but sometimes it works. During the last election, the Toronto Star predicted X Liberal seats in Toronto, Y Conservative seats, and Z NDP seats. By looking at a riding map and using the process of elimination, I was able to determine which way my riding was predicted to go, and that prediction was correct.

Remember: do NOT use national polls to inform your strategic voting. Your vote is only effective in your riding. No matter how earnestly you vote, you cannot cancel out votes in another riding. Vote strategically only if the situation in your very own riding demands it, regardless of what the rest of the country is doing.