Vancouver's Brad Touesnard recently launched Vote Swap Canada, allowing voters to "connect with people across Canada who want to minimize vote splitting and increase the effectiveness of their vote." You can essentially trade votes with another Canadian in a different constituency if the party that you support is unlikely to win in your riding but likely to win in another. Each swapper agrees to support a different candidate in hopes of helping their own party in the long run.
The program is different than other vote-swapping sites, argues Touesnard, in that users send personal requests to other voters in different ridings matching their swap criteria, rather than being automatically paired. Potential swappers can accept or deny the resquest, and users can send as many requests as they need to in order to get a willing partner. Touesnard also encourages swappers "to open a dialog with [the other voter] to be on the safe side."
The concept is essentially a good one--significant downfalls of Canada's single-member plurality voting system are that a candidate can win without a majority, and that pre-election poll results can sway voters. Though the swapping is based on the honour system and it will be difficult to really map how effective it is, Vote Swap Canada remains an interesting idea--not at all what political parties likely had in mind when they considered how to use the web to their advantage.
I couldn't disagree more, the concept is not at all a good one. Those before us have fought and died to give us each an opportunity to place a vote towards who governs us; do you honestly think they fought so some of us could swap/sell a vote in a misguided effort to keep a party out of power? The interesting thing about it is I've read where some experts are indicating this is hurting the fringe parties like NDP and Green more than the intended targets, the Conservatives.
"The concept is essentially a good one--significant downfalls of Canada's single-member plurality voting system are that a candidate can win without a majority, and that pre-election poll results can sway voters."
How does this service even begin to address this issue? Candidates will still win without necessarily receiving a majority; the only possible outcome is that different candidates may win, but still may do so by capturing only 35% or so of the vote.
As to the pre-election poll comment, that's even more ridiculous. Are you suggesting that open and free coverage of elections is a downside of our system? If anything, this application simply enhances their impact, since it's driven almost entirely by what poll numbers say about which candidate is likely to get elected in which riding.
The "solution" to perceived problems with our voting system is intelligent advocacy for proportional representation, not turning a process into a game that further dumbs down the political process.
I think the bottom line is that there are people who vote strategically rather than for the party they actually support. Swapping votes with someone in another riding allows these strategic voters to still pledge support for the party they truly support while ensuring a vote in their riding against the party they despise.
Of course, proportional representation would eliminate the need for vote swapping. But in reality proportional representation isn't in place and I believe participation in vote swapping is one way to show you are not satisfied with the status quo. The more press vote swapping gets (good or bad), the more election officials will be pressured to make some changes.
@Daniel I don't think anyone is disputing that open and free coverage of an election is an essential part of our democracy. However, I think pollsters kind of throw a wrench into the democratic process, skewing election results, and there's always the danger of results being partisan. I don't think there's an easy solution to this. Proportional representation doesn't solve this problem because pre-election polls will still sway votes.
@Brad: Sorry but I think that point about pollsters is simply the price you pay for freedom of press and opinion. So what if pre-election polls sway votes? And why is this worse than a Facebook application that seeks to sway votes entirely because of what polls are reporting?!
Don't get me wrong, I don't think there should be any kind of restriction on what you're doing, and in fact I'm not particularly supportive of proportional representation, but to be honest it smacks of social media gimmick more than anything else. It's yet more "consumption" of politics rather than true engagement with the political process.
@Daniel I don't think vote swapping applications can really sway votes on their own and certainly not to the extent of a pre-election poll. That's a big difference. People who look to use a vote swap application are already considering voting strategically, hence their vote is already influenced by the pre-election numbers. I think swapping votes is just an attempt to correct the imbalance created by the pollsters.
