Andrew Potter says it doesn’t matter if Elizabeth May is invited to the leaders debates because debates are stupid. This has prompted me to consider how I actually feel about the leaders debates.

My parents like watching debates, so I remember them as a way to feel connected to the abstract world of politics. (Perhaps this is why I consider politics a spectator game, like professional wrestling.) In my early 20s, I figured debate parties would be a good way to bring political buffs together and engage the apathetic, although I don’t remember many actual parties. I do remember a bartender scoffing at me when I asked if they’d switch from ESPN 7 to the Obama-McCain debate. Now I know few people with cable, so debates are no longer part of my political experience.

I agree with Potter insofar as debates seem to underscore what everyone already knows: Preston Manning and Stephane Dion weren’t bilingual enough to be Prime Minister; Stockwell Day just wasn’t competent enough; Rita Johnson was leading a dying party; and nobody, not even Elizabeth May, deserved a majority in 2008.

I approve of debates at least in principle because they’re summarize an election: apathetic voters can tune in (and will as long as it’s a watercooler topic) and the leaders at least have an opportunity to identify fundamental issues of the campaign and summarize their party’s platforms. If someone were to invest only 1 hour in a political race, a televised debate is in the running (a local all-candidates’ meeting is more effort). Debate is traditionally a very important part of the Westminister system of government, much moreso than in the United States, so it’s reasonable to expect our leaders to be good debaters, although it’s not reasonable to demand that they look good on TV.

Zeb recently pointed me to the CBC’s Vote Compass app. You may have filled out a socialist/capitalist-libertarian/authoritarian test that’s popular online, but instead of asking you generic political questions, this one asks you about controversial issues in Canada. This results in a different centre of gravity than the international Political Compass test.

It’s quite a sophisticated application, with the ability to remove but not weight areas of concern and compare your answer with parties’ positions on an issue-by-issue basis. They missed an opportunity by not having the Share on Facebook option publish your score. In fact, given that it’s a Flash app, there’s no way to link to your score and the saving feature doesn’t seem to work.

The way it was produced sounds surprisingly rigorous and the political parties were given an opportunity to dispute the calibration. Relevant quotes and links to party documents are provided for each question. The questions about who you think would be the best Prime Minister seem kind of useless, but I’m assuming CBC is going to publish statistics from the app throughout the election.

The left-wing blogosphere has decided it’s rigged in some way or another, but I’m satisfied that it’s good enough. When anybody asks me for advice on who to vote for, this is where I’ll send them if I don’t know how to vote strategically in their particular district.

The Governor General is expected to drop the writ for a federal election on Saturday. I’ve been taking a look at the Greater Victoria districts to figure out where the action is going to be:

Esquimalt-Juan de Fuca

After 18 years in the wilderness and increasingly close elections, Keith Martin has decided not to run again. Troy DeSouza is making his third run at this riding, and I expect Conservative HQ will give him a lot of support (his webpage gives the impression that the government has been treating him as unofficial MP). Randall Garrison is also making his third run with the NDP, but he made the smart move of spending the last three years on Esquimalt Council. Although Lillian Szpak, the Liberal candidate, is a Langford Council member, I feel that her inexperience in a federal campaign means she’ll come in third place this time out but first place could go either way.

Saanich-Gulf Islands

Last election, Briony Penn, the Liberal candidate with immpeciable green credentials lost to Gary Lunn even after the NDP candidate withdrew: besides Stephane Dion, it’s hard to imagine better conditions for the left to unite. Penn has decided not to run this time, which suggests that she thinks Lunn is unbeatable. Green Party leader Elizabeth May has parachuted into this riding, which has a history of dashed hopes for the Greens. The Liberal and NDP candidates won’t sap too many votes from May, but I’m still skeptical that she can beat Lunn.

Victoria

Denise Savoie got more votes than the weak Conservative and Liberal candidates combined in 2008. This election’s conservative candidate, Patrick Hunt, was a young MLA in Nova Scotia: I’d say he might know a thing or two about campaigning, except he managed to lose his seat while the Conservatives were rising in power. Given that the polls in BC are swinging against the Conservatives, I don’t think he’s a legitimate threat. Christopher Causton, the mayor of Oak Bay, certainly has some standing in Victoria, but he only got 4500 votes for mayor and he’ll need over 20,000 to beat Savoie.

To summarize, if you’re interested in volunteering for a party, here are the districts that need you most:

But keep an eye on the polls and the Election Prediction Project in case things start to swing in other districts.

I’m a member of the Coast Capital Savings credit union. Their board of directors has staggered terms, so every year they have an election to replace some of the board members.

The outgoing directors form a nominations committee, which recommends some of the candidates. This strikes me as vaguely corrupt, but Google tells me that they’re common for both private and non-profit boards. They are correlated with bad performance and corruption when the CEO or current board members sit on the committee, but I couldn’t find anything bad about outgoing directors, although external directors are considered the best people to have. Given that the recommended candidates usually win, it does make me wonder about the democratic value of the membership merely certifying the recommendations?

This is the first year they’ve had online voting, which is interesting because I consider online voting impossible to secure. But a credit union board isn’t exactly a high-stakes election and banks spend more time worrying about securing their websites than anybody else. (Another option would be voting by ATM!)

Another thing that I don’t think they’ve done in the past is that Coast Capital Savings will donate $1 to charity for every vote. It’s a bit ironic that if you don’t vote you can presume that the money will be indirectly given back to you as a member in the future, but I suspect it will increase voter turn-out in this case.

$1 to charity is much more of an incentive than a few dollars back to you on your tax return, which is what some people have proposed to raise turn-out in public elections. I can’t imagine how this would work for public elections: vote and we’ll increase social services, don’t vote and we’ll lower your taxes.

During the Liberal leadership race, Christy Clark proposed the following decision procedure:

If the House prefers not HST then not HST
Else if the voters prefer not HST then not HST
Else HST

This conditional short-circuits: you only run an initiative vote if the House supports the HST. The media misinterpreted her as suggesting that the House’s decision on the HST overrides an initiative vote either way. Rather than point out that she’s not an idiot but the journalists are, she decided to switch to the proposal of other leadership candidates to hold an earlier vote. It might not be the best use of money, but it was distracting from her leadership bid.

What most people overlook is that all the Recall and Initiative Act (hereafter just Initiative Act) actually does when there’s a successful vote is introduce a bill in the House, which the House then gets to vote on or amend. The Initiative Act is more about symbolism than real political power, but because it’s assumed that the government will oppose initiatives, the Act lays out all the details including date of the vote so Cabinet isn’t tempted to meddle.

As Vaugh Palmer notes, changing the date of an initiative vote is the kind of meddling the Initiative Act is designed to avoid, so it will require legislative change, recalling the House during the NDP leadership race. Instead of doing that, Clark should issue an Order in Council to hold a referendum under the Referendum Act and the House can get around to extinguishing the vote under the Initiative Act any time before September. Unlike initiatives, the results of referenda are actually binding on the government, so this should satisfy the opposition. But just to be sure the Order details should follow the Initiative Act, including using the question written by Elections BC.

Right now, absentee ballots in Canada are sent out by mail and then returned by mail. Getting them too and from remote locations (like Kandahar) in the time between the writ drop and the close of voting is a challenge. Elections Canada agrees that vote-by-mail should be replaced by voting online – whether vote-by-ballot should also be replaced is another issue.

The District of Columbia recently put up an online voting system for public testing. Some academics quickly found a common web app vulnerability and demonstrated a number of evil things that can be done on a compromised server. None of the things they did once they had access are notable, the issue is that an online voting server must be secure.

Part of the vulnerability comes from the government’s obsession with PDFs, because if someone gets a butterfly ballot, everyone should get a butterfly ballot (never mind the fact that blind voters have a fundamentally different presentation). But it strikes me that an insufficiently rigorous approach was used in developing this application, as this comment underscores:

My real issue with this is that they spent $300,000 of federal grant money (taxes) to deliver a web app that not only used possibly the worst method of data entry conceivable [FILE UPLOAD? PDF? SERIOUSLY?] but didn’t even make the most basic of checks against user input? It directly ran user inputed text on a command line?

Did they pay a highschool CS student $5/hour to code this while blowing the other $290,000 on cocaine and hookers? I hope so, because if they paid anyone an actual salary for this kind of shody work, they should fire the staff that hired them.

The developers used Ruby on Rails, a toolkit for rapid development or in the case of an application like this, rapid prototyping. I’d like to see the software for electronic and online voting systems be proven correct and secure. Not only because I am one of relatively few people in the world who knows how to do such a thing, but you know, for democracy.

In the US, all election functions are done at the county level, so it’s massively distributed. Policy is generally set at the county level and legislation at the state level. Coordination of election rules between states is only because of convention. Elections in Canada are more-or-less centralized: some functions are done by a central agency and some are done by returning officers in each electoral district.

Elections BC has just published a report explaining how a Canadian electoral agency works. It includes a section on voting, but it’s mostly about what goes on behind the scenes to result in an “elector” putting a ballot in a box. There’s a bit of a bias toward BC and federal jurisdictions, but an attempt has been made to generalize it for all provinces.

This report is mostly of interest to very hardcore politics geeks. The report notes that running an election is the largest project undertaken in a country (the Vancouver Olympics had 25,000 volunteers; Elections BC had 32,000 employees on May 12, 2009), so it might also be of interest to business geeks.

You should probably read it if you’re going to apply to be BC’s next Chief Electoral Officer. It’s also a manual on how to start a private election services provider, which I think is a fascinating thing to privatize.

The first assignment I submitted for my economics class was based on this post on the economic irrationality of voting. The final assignment is to go back and criticise that.

Neoclassical microeconomics does not give enough emphasis to transaction costs. In particular, calculating which behaviour is optimal has a high cost. Gathering all the data and doing all the math to choose the right option costs time and resources. If we tried to make optimal economic decisions, “analysis paralysis” would result.

Instead, economic agents use heuristics to approximate solutions under bounded rationality (“satisficing”). For example, voters could use a loss aversion heuristic: the cost of living under a bad government is higher than the cost of voting, so even though the chance of a bad government winning the election is low, it’s worth voting just in case.

Social costs and benefits are also glossed over in neoclassical microeconomics. For example, you’ll see your neighbours at your local voting place – this could be an opportunity for social interaction or members of your social group may notice if you don’t vote. Decreasing voter turn-out could be caused by a decrease in geographic social ties. If you admit to not voting, there may be social penalties.

Finally, neoclassical microeconomics assumes the possibility of static equilibrium. But economies may be dynamic systems that never settle on a state. For example, the marginal value of voting may be close to zero, but if everyone but me chooses not to vote, then my vote has a huge value (I can elect myself dictator). As the voter turn-out drops, the value of each vote increases: so more people should vote.

Mandatory voting could increase the cost of not voting. Tax rebates for voting could increase the benefits of voting. But I think the psychology of behavioural economics has a lot more promise for increasing voter turn-out.

All provincial and federal public servants are supposed to be non-partisan during work hours. Most of them are free to do partisan activity in their free time. We’ve come a long way since 1960 when Dave Barrett had to get special permission to run, and even longer since 1899 when public servants weren’t allowed to vote in BC. I happen to be in one of the few positions that has a higher burden of non-partisanship (although that hasn’t been tested in court, as far as I know): I am expected to remain non-partisan in my private life.

The members of the Local Government Elections Task Force were all appointed by Cabinet. Apparently some people^[who?] consider the Task Force to have a partisan slant. To maintain my squeaky-clean image, my employer asked me to remove my personal opinions from my post on the Task Force.

The impact of social media on the political status of public servants is an active area of research. Requests for interviews with me can be left in the comments.

BC local government is made up of municipalities, regional districts, the Islands Trust, the Vancouver Park Board and school districts (the UBC Endowment Lands committees are advisory, not governing; First Nations governments represent off-reserve members so they’re not considered local).

[Redacted]

The Local Government Elections Task Force is developing a new model [for local government elections] and started soliticing feedback today.

[Redacted]