[–] nicky_haflinger 0 points 1 point 1 point (+1|-0) ago
Your vote counts one no matter where it is cast. If you are asking will your vote be determinitive, well it probably isn't right now. While there are elections that turn on single votes they are quite rare and even in the case that you are participating in one your vote is still quite dilute. If 3000 people vote A and 3001 people vote B and 45 people vote C then which of the 3001 B'ers put them over the top? In the long term course of your life future generations sense you should vote for your favored candidate even if you are absolutely certain that he will loose and that by shifting your vote you can shift the election from someone you despise to someone you merely don't like as much. However assuming you have a healthy enough sense of community to be a mindless rabid partisan attaching yourself to a party better aligned with your beliefs becomes your long term maximizing strategy.
[–] Butelczynski ago
Of course there is a point to it.Your vote is one of very few things politicians actually hear very loud. Every vote,no matter what level of government ,is dissected afterwards many,many times over by statisticians,strategists,"think tanks" and God knows who else. Proof can be found with the way major parties treat each other after elections wherever voting patters are shifting. Remember "orange crush" in Quebec?Wildrose Party in Alberta? Look what happen there afterwards.
Your voice and vote carry good weight no matter who and where you are . Ok,maybe less so in GTA but that's just hell hole:) kidn
[–] Lumidaub 0 points 1 point 1 point (+1|-0) ago
Well, depends. It's difficult. Being German, I also know little about politics in Canada. But let me explain why I vote for smaller parties in Germany.
See, we have two big parties, CDU (conservative tendencies) and SPD (slightly more left-ish when compared to the CDU), these traditionally have the most votes. The Greens are usually considered the third largest party. And then we have several smaller (Die Linke "the Left", FDP, the Pirate Party...) and much smaller parties. All of them are more or less influential, most of them on a federal state level or at least on a city level.
Problems arise, when the extreme right parties, which also exist and which in Germany usually means Nazis (or, to be more precise and less polemic, xenophobes), somehow manage to get higher percentages of the votes and can enter a city or state parliament or even the Bundestag. Apart from the fact that everybody else doesn't want them around in the first place, they are known to abuse the democratic system (and some have openly admitted that they want to abolish it) for example by blocking any decisions about anything, flooding the administration with nonsense propositions and so on.
You might say, well if they get higher percentages, then democracy has spoken and obviously a large number of people want them in power, so who am I to say they shouldn't? Good point.
Imagine a city has 100.000 inhabitants of voting age.
Some of them would vote for the bigger parties, but (probably rightfully so) assume they'll win anyway, so they stay at home on election day, have a beer and relax in their back yard.
Most of them are weary of the bigger parties. They don't think their vote can change anything, maybe they would even like to vote Pirate or Green or another smaller party, but they think it's no use, because they assume they won't get enough votes to get into the city's parliament anyway (depending on what exact parliament we're talking about they'd need 5% of the votes). So they stay at home on election day, have a beer and sit in their backyard, brooding over the unfairness of it all.
In the end, 20.000 people went to the elections. 11.000 gave their vote to the two bigger parties, 8.000 votes went to various smaller parties, but 1.000 votes actually went to the local extremist party.
That's because extremists are VERY good at mobilizing their forces and making ALL their people go vote.
In a city of 100.000 voters, 1.000 people, a tiny minority of 1%, enabled the extremists to enter parliament. There were too few voters overall, so they got a much higher percentage of votes than they would have gotten if all voters had cast their vote, even if that vote had gone to a party that in the end didn't make it into parliament.
So, in my humblest opinion, it is important to vote, vote whatever you can identify with, even if that vote might be lost, just to prevent minority opinions to gain more power than they should have.
[–] [deleted] ago (edited ago)
[–] Lumidaub 0 points 1 point 1 point (+1|-0) ago
Thank you, I try my best.
You're right about the 5% threshold not being the non plus ultra, it does favour the traditional parties and is regularly challenged where it's established.
I don't even think it would be really necessary to have it to prevent the worst from small extremist groups, if just everybody (or at least a vast majority of people) actually went to elections. Because then too it would mean that extremists only got very, very few seats and couldn't do as much damage. Still an annoyance but at least they couldn't say they're being prevented from participating. But apparently people have better things to do on a Sunday than spare 10 fucking minutes to check a box or two.