On Tactical Voting

In just over a week, we have a General Election. Once again, tactical voting is high on the agenda for the media - and therefore for voters. There are a number of good reasons to avoid tactical voting, which I'll set out below. But first, the advantages:

The Advantages of Tactical Voting

1. You can pretend that it's all about stopping a truly evil candidate from gaining power.

 
Right, we've got that out of the way. So:

Reasons to Avoid Tactical Voting Like the Plague

1. It's a vote for the current electoral system.

You probably don't think our current, first-past-the-post (FPTP), system is very good. It is widely criticised, and many developed countries have more sophisticated arrangements that can be helpfully gathered under the banner, 'Proportional Representation' (PR). The only people that I can find sticking up for FPTP are those who benefit from it - which is unfortunately most MPs, who are the ones with the power change it.

A big problem with FPTP is that it pushes out smaller parties and makes it very hard for them to grow. This is because people see a vote for them as wasted, since they are definitely not going to win. The Green Party have suffered from this problem for as long as I've known them.

If you vote tactically, you are endorsing the first-past-the-post system. The system demands that you only champion candidates from the major parties, and how could you emphasise your support for that system better than by doing that? You are saying, "I am happy to play under your rules", and by denying smaller parties your vote you accept that they will wither and die off.

2. It conceals your true beliefs.

You're a fully-rounded human being, aren't you? You know what you believe in, the kind of society you want to live in? How you'd like your life to be?

Well, you get once chance every four or five years to tell the people running the country how you feel. To make some input into the machine. FOUR OR FIVE YEARS. Surely it behoves you to actually take this seriously? To examine the candidates' statements and their parties' manifestos? To find out which of them most closely represents your views?

Yes, there are knock-on problems. What if none of the candidates are satisfactorily aligned with you? Ooh, it's time for an Aside:

How the ballot paper should change

The current ballot paper gives you a box against each candidate. You then put a cross against your chosen candidate (or candidates, when multiple posts are being elected).

I would add two further boxes at the bottom of the ballot:

I think that covers everybody. Now it can be compulsory to vote :)

That's sorted out the ballot paper. But we're still stuck with you not registering your views! Your vote for Candidate X, who is The Only Hope of preventing Candidate Y from gaining power, may well be tactical; but from the point of view of the candidates, the electoral officers, and everybody else in the World, you voted for Candidate X - so you support the policies of Candidate X and their party. Your true intentions and beliefs are hidden and unknowable.

What a waste. Do you value your own beliefs and opinions so little that you would conceal them when you're eventually asked for them?

3. You voted for THEM?

This is the killer problem with tactical voting: you're voting for the lesser of two evils. For a candidate that you wouldn't normally vote for, and whose actions - and party policies - you presumably do not agree with. But you're being told it's to avoid a greater evil.

Does that sound familiar, at all?

The idea of scaring people into backing something they wouldn't normally support is well-known and so embedded in our society and media that we take it for granted: sweeping new powers for the security services are justified under the Prevention of Terrorism. The Iraq War - er, the most recent one - was justified with ludicrous claims about Saddam having WMDs that could hit Western targets in 45 minutes. The media dutifully whacked up the rhetoric, but even then millions of people didn't believe it: it stretched credulity too far. Of course, we still invaded, we secured the oil fields. But the principle that was used was the same one that's used to gain your tactical vote: "It's a hard choice, but you know what you have to do."

So you vote for a candidate you don't like, who represents a party you don't like, in order to stop another candidate and party that you like even less. An entirely negative approach, and you end up with a party you don't like and no pressure for that to ever change.


Frankly, bollocks to that. I'm going to vote for the candidate I believe in, for the party I believe in.

I know they won't win. Not this time. But every time, their share of the vote goes up, even under this terrible system. Because millions of people, up and down the country, refuse to vote in fear. And if we carry on voting for people, for policies - rather than against them - then we will see change. Those small parties will gain traction, get airtime and media attention, and maturity. Then at some point the current system will become obviously farcical, and some form of PR will have to be installed.

Or we can carry on with the current system, and the same three increasingly-similar parties can continue to play musical chairs in our Parliament while we look on, our true beliefs sidelined and forgotten.

It's your choice, and your vote.