The past few days have seen a surge in signups, and will likely continue until Friday, the last day of registration. Latest statistics on pair voters as of Wednesday, Oct 9 11:59 pm:

• Green – 418
• NDP – 354
• Liberal – 212
• Bloc Québécois – 25
• Conservative – 23
• Libertarian – 2
• Animal Alliance Environment – 1
• Communist – 1
• Marijuana – 1

Total: 1040

Predicted number of total signups by Friday, October 10: > 1000

Available swap votes by party

Here is the data that matters most. The number of voter pairs is limited by the number of voters in swing ridings willing to vote for each party.

Potential swapped votes in swing ridings per party. Note that the actual number of total available votes is less because someone who is willing to vote for multiple parties is counted more than once:

• Liberal – 328
• NDP – 196
• Bloc – 18
• Conservative – 13
• Green – 11
• Marijuana – 7
• Communist – 6
• Libertarian – 2

View breakdown of available votes by riding.

The swing ridings are determined by the latest riding-by-riding projections at democraticSPACE.com.

May Day – Green party needs swing voters in Central Nova (and elsewhere)

There is tremendous interest by Green party supporters to swap their vote to support Elizabeth May, leader of the Green Party. Alas, most are going to be disappointed unless their is a sudden surge in registrations in May’s riding. I suggest people contact local media there, and anyone they know in or near the riding to get the word out that hundreds of votes are available for Elizabeth May, if there are some voters, likely Liberals who are willing to swap. The Conservative, NDP and Green parties are all in the race for the Central Nova seat.

Overall, there are far more Green party voters wanting to swap votes than there are people available to swap with in the few ridings the Greens have a chance of winning.

Time for an update, and probably this will be my last significant post before the election, as I will be away at a conference from Tuesday – Sunday. Great timing, I know. Thanks, Stephen, maybe next time consult with me on the date, ok?

I’ve got some good news and some bad news:

Good News

• Registration deadline extended to Friday, October 10
• Ranking ridings for your party deadline extended to Friday, October 10
• Over 730 registered pair voters, should hit 1000 before Friday! Registrations are ramping up with just over a week to go before the election.
• Pairing process is largely automated now, using the lists of ranked ridings per party and rotating between parties based on their number of voters in swing ridings.
• As soon as some riding data is cleaned up, the first round of automated pairings will begin. I was hoping to pair a small batch of voters tonight, now hoping to do that tomorrow (Monday).
• Pairings will be made throughout the week, with the last pairings happening on Saturday, if all goes well.
• A few pairings have already been made, for people voting in advanced polls. I have to say it was fun to be the match maker.

Bad News

• We need more voters in swing ridings, especially for the Green party. The number of possible pairs is entirely dependent on the number of voters in swing ridings. There are hundreds of Greens wanting to pair their vote, but just a handful of swaps available. Green supporters, do whatever you can to reach out to voters in your swing ridings.
• Those of you who live in very secure ridings, i.e. there is a clear projected winner won’t likely be paired.
• Few people have taken time to help rank ridings for their preferred party. I’m not sure if people just aren’t aware, don’t understand it, don’t feel they have enough knowledge to rank or just don’t want to be bothered to participate. This was an experiment, so interested in people’s feedback as to why it isn’t working.

Measuring Impact – Swing Voter Breakdown

I will post a breakdown of potential swing voter pairings by party and riding tomorrow, hopefully. The code is in place, just need to clean up the riding data (and wishing I had enough coding chops to have consistent riding data coming in instead of various spellings).

Four days is a long time for me to not post anything. I’ve had to switch gears this past week and focus on the process of pairing voters, stopping my marketing efforts, like tracking blog posts and Twitter tweets, as well as posting info to Facebook. Media requests kept me hopping, and challenging me to fit in enough consulting work (day job). CBC Regina, Global Regina, OrmistonOnline, CityNews in Toronto, Toronto Observer and the Queen’s Journal (Queen’s university paper) were the latest last week to inquire about the pair vote phenomenon. I’ve been amazed (as has my wife) at how long I’ve been able to keep this up. Those years of sleep deprivation training looking after the twins (now 2) and Malia (now 4) seemed to be paying off.

On Thursday, I finally hit a wall. The demands of 3-4 hours / day over the past 3 weeks finally took its toll, and I turned into a walking zombie. Didn’t do any pair vote work that night, just made my way to a pillow, wondering how I could keep up the pace. Well, truth is, I couldn’t.

Thankfully, just when you are at your time of greatest need, is when help suddenly arrives on the scene. I owe a big debt of gratitude to Katya in Ottawa for taking over data intensive work: following up with people when data needs correcting, preparing the ranked riding party lists and whatever other data work I can send her way. She’s my angel of mercy.

Kudos also to Matt Bowen and Carlos de la Guardia, two friends I know in the Plone community (I’ve also worked a little with Carlos). Together, they took over the tasks of coding the pair process, from scanning the voter lists to compiling the paired voters and sending off notifications by email. That was a HUGE monkey off my back. Guys, free beers on me at the Plone conference this week.

Of course, I can’t write a gratitude post without mentioning my wife, Rowena, who has had to put up with not seeing much of her hubby after the kids go to bed, and taking more than her usual share of the household duties. She could be complaining about it, and rightly so, but instead has been a solid supporter throughout.

Now that I don’t have to spend time with data management or think about how to put paired voters together, I’m able to continue accepting registrations for another week while at the conference. Looking forward to reaching 1000 registered voters, something I didn’t expect to happen when I created this experiment.

Thank-you also to the many people who have sent me words of encouragement and gratitude for the chance to make their vote count. Your support and interest in reforming our voting system is what keeps me going.

Note: both of these sites provide analysis for the traditonal form of strategic voting, which means voting for a party to keep another party from winning, rather than the party you prefer to support. A better alternative, in my biased view, is pair voting. Still, the information they provide helps to understand ones’ voting options.

Vote For Environment

http://www.voteforenvironment.ca/

This is hands down the slickest strategic voting site out there. You can find your riding 3 ways, including an interactive Google map. Somehow they pull in poll data from multiple sources, and use that information to update election result predictions according to their voting algorithm. Each riding has its own page, complete with a Google map and a number of statistics:

The bar graph on the left presents the number of votes each party received in that riding in 2006 modified by each party’s current standing in this week’s cumulative polls.

By changing the drop-down menu below the bar graph you can choose to show the results of the last election or the results of the last election modified by any one individual poll taken during the week.

Note: VoteforEnvironment only offers a pick when strategic voting is necessary to elect or retain a pro-environment candidate in a given riding (read: someone who isn’t Conservative).

Although VFE is a partisan site to help voters decide how to vote strategically against Conservative candidates, even Conservative supporters can look at the polling data to assist them in how to vote in their riding and to decide if it is worth pair voting or not.

DemocraticSPACE

http://www.democraticspace.com/

Greg Morrow and his team do a solid job every election on their predictions. This is a non-partisan web site. Every few days they post their current projections, including riding by riding predictions which you can download. On Monday Sept 29 they published their strategic vote recommendations (en Francais) by riding for supporters of each party.

Naomi Klein told a standing room only audience last week that the left needs to form a coalition to defeat the Conservatives.

Afterwards, people remained in the hall to discuss strategic voting in the federal election. Klein recommended a national coalition called VotePair, which has set up a vote-coordinating web site.

She did state incorrectly, however that the site is set up as a means to defeat Conservatives. That is in fact untrue. Pair Vote is a service to *any* voter who wants to make their vote count in this election. There are orphan voters on all sides of the political spectrum.

From the article Naomi Klein: “It’s time to grow the hell up” [Briarpatch Magazine]

Personal. Passionate. Motivated to action. Thanks for sharing, Bob.

Dear [first name field],

This letter is blatantly political, but it is also personal. And urgent. I’ve been watching the federal election campaign with something bordering on despair. In all my 63 years, I have never known a government less in tune with my values than this one – and that is going some. By the polls, most of us feel kinda the same way. But we are divided among four parties, and that may allow Harper and his cronies to waltz back into power.

Skip to the next paragraph if you like, but I gotta get this 100-word rant off my chest: “In two years under Harper, Canada has become one of the worst heel-draggers on global warming. Our military has shifted from peace keeping to war making. Where we once welcomed war resistors, we now turn them away. In April, the Conservatives de-regulated and privatized food inspection, and we know what happened in August. They plan to do the same for the airline industry. Prisons, they say ‘are for punishment.’ And for 14 year olds. They don’t much like the arts and they don’t get the internet. I could go on. If Harper wins his majority, I shudder to think how, well, American, Canada will become.” End of rant.

What – as William Bendix used to say – a revolting development this is!

And yet, something is afoot. I don’t know about you, but I have been receiving dozens of messages from friends and strangers talking about what amounts to do-it-yourself proportional representation. I can’t say I’ve become optimistic, but I do believe there are two effective things we can do.

The first is to make our votes count. We may not have rep by prop (we are one of the world’s most backwards democracies in this regard) but we can fake it. If I lived in Central Nova, I would vote for Elizabeth May in a heartbeat. But here in Nanaimo-Cowichan, to vote Green (or for that matter to vote Liberal), is, de facto, to vote Conservative. Lucky for me, our local MP, Jean Crowder, is good people, and anti-Harper through and through. I don’t have to hold my nose when I vote. (I just have to roll my eyes at Jack’s car-salesman style.) But if the best way to stop the Conservatives was to vote Liberal, this time I would. With glowing heart. (Registered trademark, 2010 Olympics, all rights reserved.)

Fortunately, voting strategically has just gotten a whole lot easier. There is now an amazing website, www.voteforenvironment.com, that is tracking every riding in the country and making up-to-the-minute suggestions on how best to fight Harper. It is the coolest example of Canadian grassroots democracy since the Free Trade comic book.

So that is the first thing to do: check out www.voteforenvironment.com.

And there is another thing just as important. This happens to be a time when our ability to communicate with one another has never been greater. To contact you with this message, I just had to overcome my reticence about doing it. (I’m Canadian, after all.) The rest, nowadays, is easy. If you do it too, if you contact your friends and colleagues, acquaintances and list-mates, and let them know what you are thinking, we could actually affect the results in some key ridings and, who knows, we might even affect more than that. It’s worth a try.

bb

Bob Bossin
Old folksinger

Got this email today from a pair voter working hard for change in Victoria, BC. Nice work, Silvia!

Here is a copy of a letter to the editor I sent to Monday Magazine (a weekly) in Victoria, BC, in response to an article they ran on strategic voting.

I have also emailed everyone on my email suggesting they visit [www.votepair.ca] and see if they think it is a fit for them.

Subject: Letter to the editor re: Stratego

Dear Editor;

Thank you to Sid Tafler for drawing our attention to the concept of strategic voting (”Stratego” September 25-October1). Readers may be interested in a non-partisan website, www.votepair.ca, which matches voters with others who wish to swap voting locations with them. For many, this is the only chance to have their vote count in our first-past-the-post-system.

For example, if I wish to vote Green but feel it would be a throwaway vote in my riding, and the website can find me a match in a riding where a Green vote might realistically contribute to a win, but where, for example, the Liberal candidate has no chance, whereas in my riding the Liberal candidate does, then that other Liberal voter and I would agree to “swap” votes. S/he would agree to vote Green and I would agree to vote Liberal. Both of us would benefit.

Lest others wonder, this practice has been deemed legal by Elections Canada. Also, the website is open to voters of all stripes. I never vote without getting a shiver down my spine – and this is a way to make our precious democracy even more so.

Silvia Schriever

Everything you could possibly want to know about the pair voting process, the current stats on voters and what you can do to make a difference (in addition to pair voting) is here.

With just under a week left in pair vote registration, the NDP and Greens are in a tight race for the most voters in swing ridings. Winner gets to go first in the pair voting matching process (read how the process works).

In terms of total number of registered voters, the NDP are also slightly ahead of the Greens:

Ottawa South is the top ranked NDP riding while Vancouver Centre and Central Nova are tied for top spot for the Greens.

Conservative party supporters and political pundits, decide what ridings the Conservative party has the best chance of winning. Refer to this list of 68 ridings with the closest contests.

Just a reminder that the pair vote process will use the riding rankings here to allocate seats, so be careful what you wish for.

Deadline to vote: Friday, October 3

Add information about potential ridings in the comments below, to help people vote.

Vote and /or add a new riding (This requires an account at Squidoo, just register and continue, sorry for that but I’m just one guy trying to use whatever free and simple tools I can find to make this process work!)

You can also embed this list in your own site and have people vote there.