Maximization of Your Voting Power in Canadian Elections
Introduction
Historically, I have always held the belief that in a democratic election, you should only ever vote for the candidate that you truly believe in - on principle alone. If that meant voting for a political party that had less than 0.1% of the popular vote, that was perfectly fine to me. Even now, I still believe that voting for a candidate with absolutely no chance of winning can be the best way to cast your vote. However, the recent political landscape in Canada has had me rethink my paradigm for voting. Due to our flawed electoral system, I have now come to believe that the best way to cast your vote may come down to a more dynamic system that still primarily leans on absolute principle, but also introduces a minor amount of strategy.
The Strategy
The strategy that I believe should be employed when choosing which candidate to vote for can be broken into a few steps.
- Spend a few hours researching every political party and their positions.
- Briefly research your electoral district's history and current polling aggregation results.
- Make your final decision and vote based on the information gathered in the previous two steps.
I will now outline each of those steps in further detail with an explanation of how I believe that final decision should be made.
Party Research Phase
Go to a list of political parties in the election in which you are voting and visit the website for each party. If voting in a Canadian federal election, you can search for your electoral district using your postal code on the elections canada website and clicking the "Who are the candidates in my electoral district?" button to see which parties are running in your district. Assuming you are not interested in running yourself, these should be the only parties that concern you. I would like to note that you should do this closer to the election date, as sometimes a district's electoral candidates are not all confirmed until the nominations of candidates closure date. If voting in a provincial election, you should be able to similarily find which candidates are running in your district on your province's election website.
Once you have a list of parties to research, go to their websites and read their platforms. Within recent elections some parties have completely foregone creating a platform (probably because their party is full of career politicians and/or power hungry populists), so you may have to delve deeper. Search engines and Wikipedia are useful tools for this. I urge you to do your due diligence here and go beyond your current understanding of what values parties hold. You may even find that you completely agree with a party you previously thought you hated!
Electoral District Research Phase
Now that you have an idea on how your direct parties of concern stand on the issues that are important to you, you should now research your electoral district. There are two primary factors that are important to consider when understanding your electoral district: projected results via polling aggregators and historical results.
Firstly and most importantly, you should look at the projected results for your electoral district. A good polling aggregator for Canadian elections is 338Canada. You can look up your district by name in their search bar and find all of the data you will need. For simplicities sake, I would just focus on the "Odds of Winning" chart. Take note of each party's odds of winning.
Now, you should take a look at historical election results for your district. For this, I typically just use the Wikipedia page for my electoral district. You can find yours by searching something along the lines of "District-Name Federal Electoral District Wikipedia" Looking at this data, ask yourself the following: Do the historical results closely match historical pre-election polling? If not, is the margin within a range that you could still expect the same results? Does turnout tend to largely effect results in your district? If so, do your think a turnout change of ±10% will still yield the projected results?
Deciding: Voting by Absolute Principle or Strategically
Now that you have the data on your side, you should be able to make a decision on how you are going to vote and it all comes down to one question. Is there a party in your district that you feel has a greater than eighty percent chance of winning? If so, vote by absolute principle - the party you believe in most, regardless of their chance to win. Is the electoral districal a toss up where multiple parties have a chance of winning? That means your district is competitive - and your vote matters a lot. So in that scenario, you should pick the party that you like most out of the parties that you feel have a greater than twenty-five percent chance of winning, even if you dislike all of the available options. Using this strategy, your vote should have the largest impact for issues that you care about.
Why Vote by Absolute Principle
You may be wondering why you should even vote by absolute principle in the first place. Why vote for a party that has absolutely no chance of winning? The primary reason would be that it sends a message to both the elected government and other people who think like yourself. It tells the elected government that if they want to win over your vote in the next election, they must have a policy shift to better align with your views. It tells the people in your riding that share your views that there are other people out there voting for what they believe in and maybe they might vote for that party in the next election because they have a greater voteshare among the similarily platformed parties. Voting for a candidate that doesn't win still has impact.
Why Vote Strategically
Others may be asking: Why vote strategically when I don't fully agree with much from the large parties' platforms? That's because even if you care about one or two policies that those major parties differ on, you can potentially create a positive impact for yourself. You are just playing off of the hand other people have dealt you, and making the decision that suits you best. In the recent provincial elections in Ontario (2025), there were multiple districts that had less than a 1% margin between the elected candidate and their primary opponent. There was even one district that only had a difference of 8 votes!
Conclusion
In conclusion, you can use this technique or similar techniques to effectively increase the value of your vote by increasing its impact where it matters most to you. By researching each party in your district, the district itself, and getting out to vote based on that data, you are maximizing the power of your vote!