Are you a neglected and abused citizen who yearns to be represented in Parliament, only to be turned away because your vote elects no one?

OrphanVoter.ca is a campaign launched by Fair Vote Canada to reach out to these neglected voters. This is a fun and informative site that has all kinds of stats on how many people elected no one last time around, nationally, provincially and in each riding. They also have a contest this election for people to guess how many votes won’t count, both nationally and in each province.

More from Orphan Voter Facebook group:

The throngs of orphans include Liberals in the West, Conservatives in urban centres, and New Democrats and Greens everywhere. In fact, the MAJORITY of Canadians who cast ballots in federal elections usually elect no one. Last election, most Canadians casting ballots – 7,584,409 in fact – were abandoned by our political system.

Why are so many voters deserted & ignored by our uncaring electoral system? Most of us live in ridings where the winner is a foregone conclusion, and it’s only in a few dozen “swing” ridings where the election will be decided and which get most of the attention. Moreover, in each riding only the voters supporting the most popular party can elect an MP: the other voters send no one to Ottawa. And because politicians can win seats even when the majority vote against them, the overall election results are skewed. In fact a party often wins a majority of seats
without even winning a majority of votes.

Join other orphan voters across the country to demand a fairer system from our politicians. After all, there’s more of us than there is of them.

Bloc party supporters and political pundits, decide what ridings the Bloc 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.

Liberal party supporters and political pundits, decide what ridings the Liberal party has the best chance of winning. I plan to add to this list soon, but figured I’d get it up sooner than later so people could start adding and voting for their picks. 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.

Holy cow. In Elizabeth May’s words:

“I’d rather have no Green seats and Stephen Harper lose, than a full caucus that stares across the floor at Stephen Harper as prime minister, because his policies are too dangerous,” she said.

So determined is May to keep Harper from power she also told the Star she wants Liberal Leader Stéphane Dion and NDP Leader Jack Layton to join her in a pact to beat Conservatives candidates.

The Green, Liberal and New Democratic parties should prevent vote-splitting that would favour Conservatives, and carve up electoral ridings according to who has the best chance of winning, May said. “We sit down and say, `Who has the best chance of winning in all these ridings?’ What I’ve been calling for is proportional representation by other means.”

Pair voting is one method of strategic voting that lets people still get a vote for their preferred party. I doubt any party will come out and endorse pair voting because it is new and less understood in Canada, so that means those of us inspired by the idea need to reach out to fellow party supporters and invite them to participate.

Read the rest of the Toronto Star article.

NDP party supporters and political pundits, decide what ridings the NDP party has the best chance of winning. I plan to add to this list soon, but figured I’d get it up sooner than later so people could start adding and voting for their picks. 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.

More party riding lists coming tomorrow…

Green party supporters and political pundits, decide what ridings the Green party has the best chance of winning. I plan to add to this list soon, but figured I’d get it up sooner than later so people could start adding and voting for their picks. Refer to this list of 68 ridings with the closest contests. I noticed Elizabeth May’s riding isn’t on the list – how many are willing to bet she has a realistic chance?

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.

More party riding lists coming tomorrow…

Vote swapping was featured this morning on CBC Radio Ottawa, featuring our very own John Mynott. In case you missed it, here is the 7 minute clip:

CBC Radio Ottawa interview

I also had a couple of interviews of my own. Tomorrow night (Tuesday) watch the 6pm A-News in Ottawa for a video interview I did from my house in Sault Ste. Marie. This was very cool, I helped them figure out how to record an online video using iChat, the first time they had ever tried this. Watch it and see where I spend most of my days. The video will also be online tomorrow after 9 pm. Maybe after watching it I’ll wish I had stuck to the phone.

The other interview was with the University of Western student newspaper the Gazette. One interesting nugget from that conversation is that students can vote in either their home riding or the riding of their university. That means university students have two chances to end up being in a strategic riding. Ideally, we should take a look at which strategic ridings have campuses on them, and reach out to these student newspapers. The article should be up in a couple of days. I’ll try and post a link.

Greg Morrow of democraticSpace (my favourite election site) posted a few days ago his list of battleground ridings, 68 in all.

Catch the sad irony? That means only about 25% of the total ridings matter in this election, the rest are already decided. The people in a whopping 75% of ridings who want to vote for the party not predicted to win might as well stay home, their vote won’t matter. I digress.

I plan to use Greg’s list as a basis for deciding which ridings to focus on. Once I get back some data from a volunteer, I’ll post the following:

• A list of swing ridings for each party that they have a chance of winning.
• Number of vote pair registrants per riding, their preferred party and who they are willing to vote for.

We need Pair Voters in Swing Ridings

The number of pairs is determined by the number of voters signed up in those ridings. We could have 1000 people signed up, but if there are only 100 voters in swing ridings, then there is a max of 100 pairs. Take a look at the list of swing ridings, and invite people you know in those ridings to sign up if their vote won’t otherwise matter.

Add other Ridings to the Lists

The list of 68 is not cast in stone. You can add other ridings to a party list, and I suggest you add a comment as to why you feel a riding should be included, to encourage others to vote for it also.

Influence the Vote – Rank the Ridings

How to decide what order of ridings to allocate pairs to? I’m going to make the pair vote process as participatory as possible. I like James Surowiecki’s the Wisdom of Crowds, which I got to hear James talk about at a conference. You’ll get a chance to rank the ridings for your preferred party, which will influence the pairing process. Bascially, the process will try to match pairs for the top ranked riding for a party first, then the second, and so on. There is one exception, and that happens when a riding ranked lower has a significantly higher number of pair voters, and it makes sense to allocate pairs to that riding ahead of higher ranked ridings. So give the options some thought, and vote on the rank (when it is published). Your collective wisdom is better than anything I can come up with on my own.

• Rank / add to the list of Bloc party ridings
• Rank / add to the list of Conservative party ridings
• Rank / add to the list of Green party ridings
• Rank / add to the list of Liberal party ridings
• Rank / add to the list of NDP party ridings

Influence the Vote – Proportional Pairing

So which party gets first dibs on pairings? I’ve been wrestling with that question also. My idea is this – pairs are allocated proportionally to parties, according to the percentage of registered pair voter supporters they have in strategic ridings. The party with the highest number of supporters goes first. They are allocated pairs to their highest ranked riding. Then the party with the second highest number of supporters goes next, and so on.

An Example

Let’s say the number of paired voters in strategic ridings turns out to be the following:

• Greens: 100
• Liberals: 75
• NDP: 50
• Conservatives: 25

In this example, the Greens go first. All the potential pairs for the Greens in the top ranked riding are allocated, followed by all potential Liberal pairs in their top ranked riding, and so on. After one round, the process is repeated in the same order.

Let me know what you think of this approach. Nothing is cast yet in stone. This seems like a fun and fair approach, but you may have an even better idea or improvement. Post your thoughts as a comment.

Once the election is over, vote reform will disappear from the headlines. We have 3 more weeks to build awareness through healthy, informed dialogue. The best stories are the ones you already know – your personal story, how the voting system has let you down, time and time again. The collection of voter stories on this site is a powerful testimony to the will of people who want to bring about necessary change. We need to collect more.

Find and join the discussions

Ordinary citizens, journalists, political junkies are all talking about vote pairing and voting reform. Join in the conversations. Here is how you can find them online:

• Google search for vote swap, strategic voting.
• Twitter postings. Twitter is a micro blogging service. Find people talking about vote swap, strategic voting.
• Blogs talking about vote swap, strategic voting.

Local papers are also interested in local people talking on this subject. Try writing a letter to the editor, or contact the paper and let them know you are interested in doing a story on pair voting (and I’ll help you with the information you might need).

PairVote.ca members in the spotlight

Listen to John Mynott, pair voter on CBC Radio Ottawa, 7:45 am Monday morning.

I had an email discussion with Alan Parker, deputy managing editor of the Toronto Sun today. Look for the article tomorrow online and in the paper and join in the debate. Alan seems to want to focus on the shortcomings of pair voting rather than the bigger story of why so many are willing to try pair voting in the first place. We’ll see what comes out.

Update: The Toronto Sun blog post is up. Anti vote swap crusader Glyn Clarke puffs his chest and invites people to join against this “immoral” act (2nd comment beneath post).

Pair voting saboteurs.

One registered voter sent me this email:

I’m interested in pair voting but I’m worried that it’s too easy for the system to be sabotaged. It seems like it would be pretty easy to automate the process of entering false sets of information. The main bottleneck to such tactics would be that each form submission would need a new, valid email address. But I would guess there are good solutions to that problem available to those who are more experienced in such matters than myself. Do you have any safeguards in mind for this kind of thing?

The concerns are legitimate. Glyn Clarke posted the following today on Facebook:

I have started a group with the express intent on putting a wrench in the works of your vote swap.

The idea of vote swapping is deplorable and morally unethical. Your high and mighty rant about wasted votes, as well meaning as it is, is still an attempt to circumvent Canada’s Elective process.

I will be filing a report with Facebook asking them to take down this group. In the mean time I am gathering people who will be joining your ranks and making false matches with no intent on honouring theirs swaps.

How is that as a corrective measure? Talk about really wasted votes.

Suffragium caveo (voter beware)!

Good luck sorting out those who want to really swap with the infiltrators.

My response to Glyn:

Glynn, Elections Canada has ruled that vote swapping is legal. Your attempt to circumvent a legal option for voting is what is discouraging. None of us *want* to vote swap. Take a look at any country that uses proportional voting, and you’ll see that crazy hacks like vote swap aren’t necessary.

It shouldn’t matter where I live to cast a vote for the party I want. Maybe parties should provide incentives for supporters to form communes in a set of ridings to make their votes count.

This isn’t just about fringe parties either. Conservative voters get screwed also. What about all the conservatives voting in the Toronto area, or in a riding where the Liberal incumbent has won handily for 16 years? There is no incentive for them to go out and vote, and that is the real shame. That should *never* happen.

Read the first comment that went up on pairvote.ca from a red Tory named AngryPC. I can’t say it better myself: http://www.votepair.ca/voter-stories

Naturally, I’ve been thinking about the impact of people being deliberate in screwing up the process. Really, it’s not that hard to do. In the end, the trust has to be there between two persons to make the swap happen.

Vote swapping is *far* from ideal, so whay are thousands are signing up? Simply put, they are doing it because they have *nothing to lose*, and perhaps they place more trust in an inspired unfamilar voter than in our political process. For many this is one small step in changing democracy for the better. The chance to actually make a difference is worth the risk to many.

I believe vote swapping will change the result in at least one riding. The odds are too good – it should be possible to redirect hundreds of authentic votes in a few ridings at a minimum, and that is often the difference between winning and losing.

So what measures can be taken to lessen sabotage? I am appealling to you, the readers and those of you who have registered. The system does have checks to tell if one person is trying to register multiple times, but it is not fool-proof. Here are some of my other ideas:

• Each pair of voters needs to talk with each other by phone, and produce whatever identification they have that would affirm them – Facebook profile, personal blog, scan of driver’s license (with license # blacked out). Talk to the person and get a better understanding of who they are.
• Do a Google search on the person’s name. See what you can find.
• Use a tool like the Facebook app Six Degrees of Separation to find out how you might be connected to this person. It requires you to add lots of your friends and so on to make it work. Linked In is another option.
• Take a photo of the vote you cast, while in the voting booth. Not sure if this is legal, I haven’t checked the Elections Canada web site. This would only help to confirm the vote cast afterwards. This might make a fun project on Flickr. Again, unsure of the legalities here.
• Some kind of escrow, where each person willingly deposits something of value with a trusted 3rd party, and only gets it back when they can prove they voted according to the agreement (thinking of the photo idea here).
• Anyone who does not feel they can trust their paired voter enough can request another partner. I’ll do my best to accommodate.

I will not be dismayed by those who disagree with what we have started, even when deliberate attempts are made to make our efforts fruitless. Nothing worth doing comes without a price.

Are you with me?

Almost always, the creative dedicated minority has made the world better.
- Martin Luther King, Jr.