Strategic Voting Websites
Every election people on the left try to coordinate votes so that the Conservatives don't get elected. Every time they fail, and this election was no exception.
These strategic voting websites produce polling for each riding in the election, and then they predict the best party to vote for in order to defeat the Conservative candidate. The reason these websites exist is because there are three-ish left-leaning parties and one-ish right-leaning party that matters (yes, New Blue and the Ontario Party exist, but they don't matter). Thanks to First Past the Post, voters who support the NDP but would prefer the Liberals win over the Conservatives have little way to express this, so the strategic voting websites attempt to solve this coordination problem by telling voters who to support in each riding.
Strategic voting is gross. Some of these websites acknowledge it is gross, but tell voters to do so anyways, so that we avoid the worst outcome. Since we will be stuck with FPTP forever, I guess this is the best we can do. (Never forget that both the provincial and federal Liberals sabotaged electoral reform by pretending to support it. Never forget and never forgive.)
This election the main strategic voting websites people mentioned were https://smartvoting.ca and https://votewell.ca . In addition there was a Toronto-specific group called https://notoneseat.ca, which cooporated with https://cooperateforcanada.ca/ to endorse particular candidates in certain ridings.
I ought to applaud the people working on these websites. Having worked on non-partisan election information campaigns myself, I know how much work and care goes into them. But instead these strategic voting initiatives make me grumpy. They do not have the staff to understand what is going on at the ground level of each riding, so they depend on some black-box polling. Often the levels of support in this polling shows neck-and-neck races within a few percentage points, which makes endorsing a particular party nonsensical (because of error bars). But there is a far deeper problem here, and one which makes me very upset.
The premise advocated by these websites is that we are all supposed to put aside our personal preferences and vote strategically to ensure the Conservatives don't win. I may not like the Liberals, but in the spirit of solidarity I should put my personal preferences aside and vote Liberal if these websites tell me to. Strategic voting is also sending a message to the political parties: they should put their individual goals (maximizing votes even if they lose ridings) aside for the greater good. Some groups go as far as advising political parties not to run candidates in close ridings.
Given these messages, why are there multiple strategic voting websites? Can we guarantee that each of these websites makes the exact same recommendations for each riding? No we can't: for Kitchener-Conestoga, both votewell.ca and smartvoting.ca endorsed the Liberals, but cooperateforcanada.ca endorsed the NDP. Even on VoteWell and SmartVoting, I see that the polling numbers for certain ridings is not identical, which means that in principle the two websites can endorse different parties for a riding. That doesn't solve the collective action problem!
Why in the world would these strategic voting websites not combine forces and provide a united front? I argue it is for the same reasons left-leaning political parties do not merge to provide a united front. I am guessing there is ego involved, and status, and ideological differences.
Furthermore as far as I can tell SmartVoting and VoteWell do not even acknowledge that the other site exists. That's not cooperation. That is replicating the very collective action problem these strategic voting websites are trying to fix, and it is utterly hypocritical.
I think apologists for these sites will claim that they are all using the same electoral projections from https://338canada.com/ . Maybe that is a fair alibi, but then I should see the same data reflected on each strategic voting website, and I did not see that. The differences between the sites only differed by a few percent in predictions, but that is damaging enough.