A satirical take on why Canada's left keeps losing elections. The speaker blames the first-past-the-post voting system, not voters, and walks through alternative methods like ranked-choice and single transferable vote that could change the outcome. He calls for voting now while demanding the winner fix the electoral system.
Chapters
Ah, election season. That magical time every few years when we all get together to choose who should run the country by conducting a group Excel project, cross-referencing 3 vote-splitting websites, a blog post from 2017, and some guy named Brent on Reddit, all to figure out how to vote for the party that is statistically least likely to not lose while accidentally helping the party you hate win By slightly less. Canadian democracy. It's Sudoku. With consequences. So let's talk about vote splitting. Now here, lately, it's been when the left vote is scattered among the 612 left-leaning parties in this country, and whoever is the Conservative candidate just walks up the middle. It's like 3 friends arguing over pizza. 2 want pepperoni and 2 want Hawaiian, and somehow you all get stuck with gluten-free vegan crusts and existential regret. But let's be clear: vote splitting is not a bug in our system. It is the system. It's the fine print on the ballot. Now some people think that the left-wing parties should just merge. One candidate to represent everyone from, uh, eco-socialists to moderate centrists. I mean, what could possibly go wrong when you Combine vegans with pipeline pragmatists and tax-the-rich poets all in the same campaign bus together. So what's been our solution so far? Well, strategic voting. Casting your ballot not for the candidate you support, but for the one most likely to beat the candidate you fear. It's more like political Tinder than democracy. You swipe left on the raging dumpster fire and Vote for the guy whose main policy idea is bring back Vine. Here's a novel idea: fix the system, not the symptoms. The core flaw isn't indecisive voters. It's that the first-past-the-post voting system, voting for your favorite candidate, hands victory to your least favorite. So what alternatives do we have? We have ranked choice voting. That's kind of like The Bachelor, but for politics. Politics. You list your favourites in order, and if your top pick gets voted off the island, your love rebounds to your next choice. No rose ceremony needed. The least popular candidate is booted each round until someone wins the majority, and then we can all pretend it was true love from the beginning. Lots of countries do this. Ireland, uh, Australia, Sri Lanka, more than 50 jurisdictions in the US all use this method. Approval voting is my favourite. This is where every voter can select as many candidates as they want, rather than being restricted to just one choice. Literally, voters mark all the candidates that they find acceptable on their ballot. The candidate that receives the most approvals wins the election. Now, fair enough, it is not used widely. Latvia has a version of this that they've modified. The UN uses it to elect the Secretary General. Oh, and it is how the elections work in Fargo, North Dakota. And that's just two. There's runoff voting, where if no one gets a majority, we vote again. A sequel nobody asked for, starring the same candidates, only now everyone is slightly angrier. Cumulative voting, where you get multiple votes, sort of like points, and then you can dump all of them on your favorite candidate or spread them out. It's like legal vote hoarding. Score voting has, uh, voters rate candidates from 0 to 5, like you're leaving a Yelp review. The highest rating wins. There's the single transferable vote. Voters rank candidates, and if their number one has no chance or has too many votes, then their ballot gets redistributed. And like a million more different systems. God knows anything is better than the disaster we have. And yet here we are every election hoping math and luck will save us from ourselves. We don't need to tweak this system. We need to throw it in the ditch and light it on fire. First past the post is a relic from the 18th century, like powdered wigs or treating syphilis with mercury. It rewards mediocrity, punishes ambition, and elects people no one asked for. It's not democracy, it's the hostage negotiation with ballots. And we do it every single time. Today the advanced polls opened. So vote. Vote however you want. But when the party that wins is in office, let's pressure them to change this damn thing. Because we don't need more voter turnout PSAs. We need a ballot that doesn't play minesweeper with democracy.
