-- Download No More Strategic Voting: Thanks STV! as PDF --

This election will see the last strategic vote you will ever need to cast in a provincial election in BC.

STV is polling quite high and I expect it to pass. This means that you no longer have to plug your nose voting for someone to keep someone else from running the place. And it also means you don’t have to waste your vote in a protest by voting for a candidate who won’t win, all to avoid abstaining.

STV means the proportion of votes going to parties will come very close to being translated into seats in the legislature by making sure that someone you rank will use your vote to win a seat.

So if you can’t handle Gordon Campbell anymore, and would prefer not to vote for the NDP for whatever reason, but you feel you need to do it now, here’s how you can put a smile on your face.

When you cast your ballot, vote for STV as well to make sure that the next election will mean that your ranking of candidates won’t be wasted as one of them will almost certainly use your vote to become elected.

The most frustrating thing for me leading up to any election is listening to smart, passionate, concerned friends voting for parties they hate to keep from wasting their vote. Or else they don’t vote and I can understand why. If the system is this broken, it needs to be fixed.

I think for a place with only two political parties our current system is awesome since the winner will have to get more than 50% of the votes. 19th century Canada was such a place, but even then the parties didn’t need to represent women or other politically undesirables.

But in a place like Vancouver, BC and Canada, there are no two parties that effectively reflect everyone’s identities and passions. This is why we get vote splitting, unearned majority governments, wasted votes, apathy, anger and cynicism.

It’s astonishing that we can fix all these things just by changing the system.  STV here we come!

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Stephen Elliott-Buckley

Post-partisan eco-socialist. at Politics, Re-Spun

Stephen Elliott-Buckley is a husband, father, professor, speaker, consultant, former suburban Vancouver high school English and Social Studies teacher who changed careers because the BC Liberal Party has been working hard to ruin public education. He has various English and Political Science degrees and has been writing political, social and economic editorials since November 2002. Stephen is in Twitter, Miro and iTunes, and the email thing, and at his website, dgiVista.org.

Latest posts by Stephen Elliott-Buckley (see all)

• Goodbye, Politics, Re-Spun! Hello, WePivot.net! - October 21, 2016
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