In my recent column on the BC election I suggested that there may have been some potential vote splitting that led to some losses for the NDP. The assumption is that the Green vote would have gone to the NDP if the Greens were not a factor in the election. There has been a lot written on this recently and I thought it would be appropriate to add a few comments.
Let's first look at the idea of vote splitting. For those unfamiliar with the electoral system, each party can run one candidate in each of the 85 constituencies. The candidate that wins the most votes in the riding wins the seat. The individual does not need a majority of the votes only a plurality (i.e. the most votes) to win. So, for example, in the constituency Oak Bay-Gordon Head: the BC NDP received 28.42%; the BC Liberals 29.29%; the BC Conservative Party 1.86% and the Green Party of BC 40.43% (Elections BC 2013 General Election Preliminary Voting Results). So, in this case, the Green Party won with less than 50% of the vote.
The idea of vote splitting occurs when two parties of similar ideological approach "split the vote" so that a third party can "slip through" the middle and win the riding. Let us take, for example, the constituency called Maple Ridge-Mission. The BC Liberal Party received 46.59% of the vote; the BC NDP received 39.84%; the BC Green Party received 8.20%; and the BC Conservatives received 5.37% of the vote (Elections BC 2013 General Election Preliminary Voting Results). In this case, if we assume that without the Green Party, Green voters would have gone to the NDP, then we can call this a vote split because they would have received 48% of the votes.
But there are, of course, many things we need to take into account before we assume that the disappearance of the Greens would have led to a different outcome in the election. First, and many commentators have pointed this out, it is not necessarily true that Green voters would have flocked en masse to the NDP if the Greens were not on the ballot. One of my colleagues pointed out that Green Party is not particularly friendly to organized labour in some policy areas and thus some Green voters may actually have gone Liberal if the Greens were not around. The point is that we cannot assume that the Greens and the NDP represent "the left" in the same way.
Second, in many of the ridings where the Green party might have been a factor, one could argue that, in order to make the argument about "vote splitting" fair, we would have to assume that there should be a similar merger on the right. Thus we should add together the BC Conservative vote to the BC Liberals vote before we "give" a vote split to the left. So, let's look again at the constituency Maple Ridge-Mission. The Liberal Party received 10,327 votes; the NDP 8,830; the Green Party 1,818; and the Conservatives 1,190 (Elections BC 2013 General Election Preliminary Voting Results). The Liberal candidate won the riding but if we add the Greens to the NDP then "the left" got 10,648 votes and would have won the riding but if you add the 1,190 Conservative votes to the Liberal votes, then the "right" would still have won with 11517 votes. Once again, this assumes that 100 percent of the votes would go to the "ideologically alike" party and this is not at all likely. Let me explain why...
British Columbia has 26 registered parties; 15 parties ran a candidate in at least one riding and a number of independents ran throughout the province. This should tell us something about the nature of BC politics and the sense that democracy provides us the opportunity to form parties with different views and different policy options. The Green Party and the Conservative Party exist for very particular reasons. One could argue that many voters knew the potential for vote splitting; in fact, we know that some individuals departed with the Conservatives because of a fear of a vote split. Those who did not leave the Greens or the Conservatives voted for the political party they believe most represents their views. The fact is the Liberals won and, again I say, that's BC politics.
