MayDay 2011: Conservatives Win When You Don’t Vote

For all of those Liberals, Greens and NDPers out there who are interested in politics, but who don’t vote, I have one thing to say:  VOTE.

I was having some more fun with Blevkog’s Election Data Sheet (Download here: strategic-voting-ALL) and took a look at ridings where more than 40% of the voters DID NOT show up for the election (revised spreadsheet here:  strategic-voting-VOTE).

Guess what?  Of the 149 seats where the voter turn-out was less than 40%, Conservatives won 63 of these seats, or 42% of the seats where voter apathy was the greatest.

47 seats (32%) went to the Liberals and only 25 (17%) of those seats went to the NDP.

My interpretation on this is that Conservatives rely heavily on voter apathy, particularly in swing ridings and even in some ridings where the vote wasn’t even close in 2008, but could be much closer if people JUST VOTED in their ridings.

For example, in Thornhill, the Conservative candidate got 26,660 votes and the second place candidate (Liberal) got 21,448 votes.  The margin (or gap) was 9.6%, or 5,212 votes.

However, the population of eligible voters that didn’t vote was 46% or 37,000 voters.  If the Liberals among those who abstained actually showed up, 14,650 votes would have gone to the Liberals, locking up and taking another seat from the Cons.  Of course, I admit that it’s fantasy to assume that you’d get ALL abstainers, but you really only need a third of them to show up and it’ll keep the Conservatives at bay.

The point of all this:  even though the gap may seem large, it’s imperative that we get Canadians voting on election day or direct them to advance polls so that they can still have their say.