Pair Vote - Strategic Voting for 2008 Canadian Federal Election

Four days is a long time for me to not post anything. I’ve had to switch gears this past week and focus on the process of pairing voters, stopping my marketing efforts, like tracking blog posts and Twitter tweets, as well as posting info to Facebook. Media requests kept me hopping, and challenging me to fit in enough consulting work (day job). CBC Regina, Global Regina, OrmistonOnline, CityNews in Toronto, Toronto Observer and the Queen’s Journal (Queen’s university paper) were the latest last week to inquire about the pair vote phenomenon. I’ve been amazed (as has my wife) at how long I’ve been able to keep this up. Those years of sleep deprivation training looking after the twins (now 2) and Malia (now 4) seemed to be paying off.

On Thursday, I finally hit a wall. The demands of 3-4 hours / day over the past 3 weeks finally took its toll, and I turned into a walking zombie. Didn’t do any pair vote work that night, just made my way to a pillow, wondering how I could keep up the pace. Well, truth is, I couldn’t.

Thankfully, just when you are at your time of greatest need, is when help suddenly arrives on the scene. I owe a big debt of gratitude to Katya in Ottawa for taking over data intensive work: following up with people when data needs correcting, preparing the ranked riding party lists and whatever other data work I can send her way. She’s my angel of mercy.

Kudos also to Matt Bowen and Carlos de la Guardia, two friends I know in the Plone community (I’ve also worked a little with Carlos). Together, they took over the tasks of coding the pair process, from scanning the voter lists to compiling the paired voters and sending off notifications by email. That was a HUGE monkey off my back. Guys, free beers on me at the Plone conference this week.

Of course, I can’t write a gratitude post without mentioning my wife, Rowena, who has had to put up with not seeing much of her hubby after the kids go to bed, and taking more than her usual share of the household duties. She could be complaining about it, and rightly so, but instead has been a solid supporter throughout.

Now that I don’t have to spend time with data management or think about how to put paired voters together, I’m able to continue accepting registrations for another week while at the conference. Looking forward to reaching 1000 registered voters, something I didn’t expect to happen when I created this experiment.

Thank-you also to the many people who have sent me words of encouragement and gratitude for the chance to make their vote count. Your support and interest in reforming our voting system is what keeps me going.