So, I might vote Green. Or Liberal. Never Conservative. Maybe I won’t vote at all?

Maybe instead I’ll just spoil my ballot.

You see, here in Canada we are enduring yet another election; the forth in seven years. Now, don’t get me wrong, I like a good election as much as the next guy, but none of these past few electrion have been fought with any integrity, a grander vision than the search for naked power, and have essentially simply reproduced the same results each time. No one won. No one lost. Everything remained pretty much the same.

This time around, I’m leaning towards not voting. I’ve never not voted. In fact, I tried not voting last election and I couldn’t do it. I was walking past the poll with every intention of just continuing on, but it drew me in. I felt too guilty, like I was doing something wrong.

But this time it would be pretty exciting to just stroll past the polling booth, smile at all the suckers lining up to put their little pieces of paper in a box so that the same exact people, plus or minus a few, will come together again in Ottawa and play power games with our tax dollars.

Basically, I feel, and can prove with cold scientific rigour, that my vote will more likely than not count for nothing. Nothing will change whether or not I vote.

If I vote with my heart and cast a ballot for the Greens or the Libertarians, maybe the green-libertarian Marijuana Party, my vote will simply disappear amidst all the other ballots cast for all but the one winning candidate, and will, at the end of the day count for virtually nothing. It won’t be reflected in the makeup of the Parliament, nor at the end of the day, in the direction the country will take.

You see, we have an electoral system that produces obscenely distorted election results, and tends to disenfranchise the majority of Canadian voters. We live under, what the professionals call a first-past-the-post system that can theoretically – and does even in real life...every time – elect governments that have very low popular support. In fact, it can be said that as a rule more Canadians vote against the people and ideas and policies that end up running the country than vote for them!

Majority governments in Canada are consistently representative of just under forty percent of the popular vote...which means that roughly sixty percent of the Canadian population’ vote is wasted, not counted; the majority of votes cast during an election are for all intents rendered meaningless and invisible under our current electoral system.

But, how is this possible? Surely a majority government means something close to what you might imagine it to actually be. But alas, it is not. Our parliamentary system is based on a 1000 year-old governing system grown out of the particularities of British history that for perhaps obvious reasons places great emphasis on accountable, geographic representation; ie. Voting for one person to represent a particular area. Canada is divided up into 308 regions, or ridings, or if you prefer, constituencies that are represented in the Canadian Parliament each by one MP (Member of Parliament). Each riding representative, the MP, is elected directly by the 100,000 or so people that live in the area. And we here in Canada have inherited this single-member riding system of representative government, and it seemed to hum along quite nicely for a while as people’s concerns remained predominantly local. But as Canada has become ever-increasingly diverse and more diffuse, a place where values and beliefs are no longer manifested in the political system by two strong political parties but have been split among three or four or in some cases even five parties, votes have been tending towards splitting among a number of candidates, and thus to increasingly less representative governments.

We are clinging to an electoral system that relies on local homogeneity to be in any meaningful way representative and democratic in a society that is no longer that way is a tragedy of Canadian democracy. No longer do voters with similar values tend to live in concentrated blocs, but are instead spread out across the country. The Green Party of Canada received 937,613 votes in the 2008 election – 6.8% of the total votes cast – and won nary a seat in the House of Commons. Nearly a million Canadians were told to shut up and sit down by our system of electing representatives. To put this in perspective, the Bloc Quebecois which is in fact a regionally-based political party and as such does very well in our current system, won 10% of the total votes cast in Canada, and received 49 of the 308 seats.

In the riding I grew up in, the incumbent Conservative MP Gary Lunn has been nicely in place since 1997 but no more than 43% of the population has ever voted for him. (If one considers that the last election had a mere 58% turnout that means roughly 27% of eligible voters actually voted for this man!)

The disparity and inequality being revealed by these numbers, by these plain-as-day facts has pushed our system of government not simply to a point of almost endemic dysfunction, but makes the entire system illegitimate. And if the system is illegitimate, if the entire structure is rotten then pretending it isn’t and participating in the charade of voting is only giving the system some degree of legitimacy; its only prolonging our stasis as a political union, as a political people.

To tell you the truth, I can’t think of one compelling reason to vote.

The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. There will be no great shift in this election except that fewer and fewer people will feel any confidence or trust in our parliamentary system.

So, when they tell you that you have a choice to make, don’t believe them. Regardless of who in fact wins, the reality will be that more people voted against that party and their policies than did.

It’s time for electoral reform in this country and the best way to bring this about is to simply not show up on Election Day. Stay home.

What if they held an election and nobody showed up? What then?