Pair Vote - Strategic Voting for 2008 Canadian Federal Election

One registered voter sent me this email:

I’m interested in pair voting but I’m worried that it’s too easy for the system to be sabotaged. It seems like it would be pretty easy to automate the process of entering false sets of information. The main bottleneck to such tactics would be that each form submission would need a new, valid email address. But I would guess there are good solutions to that problem available to those who are more experienced in such matters than myself. Do you have any safeguards in mind for this kind of thing?

The concerns are legitimate. Glyn Clarke posted the following today on Facebook :

I have started a group with the express intent on putting a wrench in the works of your vote swap.

The idea of vote swapping is deplorable and morally unethical. Your high and mighty rant about wasted votes, as well meaning as it is, is still an attempt to circumvent Canada’s Elective process.

I will be filing a report with Facebook asking them to take down this group. In the mean time I am gathering people who will be joining your ranks and making false matches with no intent on honouring theirs swaps.

How is that as a corrective measure? Talk about really wasted votes.

Suffragium caveo (voter beware)!

Good luck sorting out those who want to really swap with the infiltrators.

My response to Glyn:

Glynn, Elections Canada has ruled that vote swapping is legal. Your attempt to circumvent a legal option for voting is what is discouraging. None of us *want* to vote swap. Take a look at any country that uses proportional voting, and you’ll see that crazy hacks like vote swap aren’t necessary.

It shouldn’t matter where I live to cast a vote for the party I want. Maybe parties should provide incentives for supporters to form communes in a set of ridings to make their votes count.

This isn’t just about fringe parties either. Conservative voters get screwed also. What about all the conservatives voting in the Toronto area, or in a riding where the Liberal incumbent has won handily for 16 years? There is no incentive for them to go out and vote, and that is the real shame. That should *never* happen.

Read the first comment that went up on pairvote.ca from a red Tory named AngryPC. I can’t say it better myself: /vot er-stories

Naturally, I’ve been thinking about the impact of people being deliberate in screwing up the process. Really, it’s not that hard to do. In the end, the trust has to be there between two persons to make the swap happen.

Vote swapping is *far* from ideal , so whay are thousands are signing up? Simply put, they are doing it because they have *nothing to lose* , and perhaps they place more trust in an inspired unfamilar voter than in our political process. For many this is one small step in changing democracy for the better. The chance to actually make a difference is worth the risk to many.

I believe vote swapping will change the result in at least one riding. The odds are too good - it should be possible to redirect hundreds of authentic votes in a few ridings at a minimum, and that is often the difference between winning and losing.

So what measures can be taken to lessen sabotage? I am appealling to you, the readers and those of you who have registered. The system does have checks to tell if one person is trying to register multiple times, but it is not fool-proof. Here are some of my other ideas:

• Each pair of voters needs to talk with each other by phone, and produce whatever identification they have that would affirm them - Facebook profile, personal blog, scan of driver’s license (with license # blacked out). Talk to the person and get a better understanding of who they are.
• Do a Google search on the person’s name. See what you can find.
• Use a tool like the Facebook app Six Degrees of Separation to find out how you might be connected to this person. It requires you to add lots of your friends and so on to make it work. Linked In is another option.
• Take a photo of the vote you cast, while in the voting booth. Not sure if this is legal, I haven’t checked the Elections Canada web site. This would only help to confirm the vote cast afterwards. This might make a fun project on Flickr. Again, unsure of the legalities here.
• Some kind of escrow , where each person willingly deposits something of value with a trusted 3rd party, and only gets it back when they can prove they voted according to the agreement (thinking of the photo idea here).
• Anyone who does not feel they can trust their paired voter enough can request another partner. I’ll do my best to accommodate.

I will not be dismayed by those who disagree with what we have started, even when deliberate attempts are made to make our efforts fruitless. Nothing worth doing comes without a price.

Are you with me?

Almost always, the creative dedicated minority has made the world better.
- Martin Luther King, Jr.