DemocraticSPACE doesn’t endorse strategic voting, and their strategic voting guide exists far more to tell the vast majority of people NOT to vote strategically than to convince skeptics to do it. But if you look at the data, there actually are a small handful of ridings in which voting for your second-choice candidate could help avoid electing your least favourite candidate.

Edmonton-Strathcona is one of those ridings.

The qualifications for the list are stringent. For a riding to make the list, all three of the following three things need to be true:

1. It must be a close 2-way race (i.e. the two competing parties must be within 5%)
2. The chances of a third/fourth/fifth party winning the riding are remote (i.e. current support for those parties must be less than ~20%)
3. A small number of votes from supporters of the third/fourth/fifth party can make a difference (i.e. fewer than 1 in 3 voters).

This means that according to democraticSPACE’s notoriously reliable mathematical model, fewer than 1 in 3 Liberals or Greens voting NDP in Edmonton-Strathcona could make the difference between a win for NDP candidate Linda Duncan and a win for Conservative candidate Rahim Jaffer.

When you can say something like that about a riding in Alberta, we’re definitely living in exciting times. And they say Canadian politics is boring!site stats