Kieran Huggins’ no-frills website “votewell.ca” will point at Ontario election ridings for one more day until he dutifully points it at the next federal election, as he has done for elections around the country since 2018.
The software developer from Victoria enables site visitors who want to oust Progressive Conservative Ontario Premier Doug Ford to quickly learn which candidate stands the best chance in their electoral district. This is done by looking at the outcomes form 338canada.com’s sophisticated prediction algorithms (for which Huggins says he’s very thankful), and simply choosing which of the non-PC candidates is out front.
When the PC candidate has little chance, his site suggests not voting strategically, but just casting for your preferred candidate.
This is to allow progressive minded voters to “un-split” the vote, as he wrote in the “what is this” section.
Huggins came up with the idea for the site when a colleague of his, a newcomer to Canada, knew he preferred several parties over Ford to win in 2018 but found the steps — looking up projections and last elections’ results and choose the most likely candidate — to be challenging for new voters.
On Huggins’ site the process is automated, it detects or allows you to pick your riding, and immediately shows the best positioned non-PC candidate for contested races.
Election polling site 338canada and other prominent pollsters show a runaway majority for Ford in the seat projection, although a clear majority of Ontarians asked — somewhere in the range of 55 per cent — would prefer a government formed by the Liberal, NDP, or Green party.
This is compared to an average nearing 45 per cent who would prefer a third Progressive Conservative term headed by Doug Ford.
Previous reporting showed that Ford’s campaign team were aware and feared the threat of such organizing, enough to buy up domains like “anyonebutford.com” all the way back in 2018 when the same vote-split enabled his government to form a majority with well under half the vote turnout.
And the outcome was repeated in 2022, when electoral reform advocate Fair Vote points out, the current Ford term took a majority with only 40.84 per cent of the actual vote. Most eligible voters stayed home in 2022. Of all eligible voters, only 18 per cent voted for Ford, while 57 per cent voted for no one at all.
Fair Vote conducted a poll published earlier this month showing that fully 68 per cent of Canadians would prefer a form of proportional representation.
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said in January that if he had “one regret” it would be his failure to live up to his promise to make the 2015 election the last that was first-past-the-post.
This was a puzzling statement given that his government was — at the time of his statement and still is — in power, and could very much fix his broken promise on electoral reform by simply initiating it now.
Despite Trudeau’s claim in the speech that he lacked the mandate and would be accused of choosing a system that favoured his own party, it was widely believed that Trudeau’s campaign promise was unpopular in the Liberal party — which has also often gained majority government from less than half the votes cast in elections.
Since just about everyone in his party has distanced themselves from his unpopularity, a surprise move might even go a long way towards his personal legacy with little party loyalty to lose.
It took three conservative wins with split-votes among more progressive parties before “Anyone-but-Harper” style organizing really took hold, which was effective enough to have Harper associates accuse organizers of using foreign funding (this was debunked).
And it looks likely that will be the nearest possibility for those who would like another party in Ontario: the election projection on 338canada.com estimates the probability of a Ford majority somewhere over 99 per cent.
But there were over 1,000 people on Huggins’ site as of Wednesday evening, he says, and an average of 25,000 per day the past two days.
And as always, says Huggins’ there are a few new players each election offering anti vote-splitting sites, like https://smartvoting.ca/ which Huggins noticed is doing lots of promotion on Tik-Tok and fundraising.
For Huggins’ case, he says it costs him about a dollar to switch the site over to a new election each time so he doesn’t see the need. When some have claimed that his efforts are being bankrolled by powerful interests, he laughs and points out that for that to be true, his funders would have to give him less than a cup of coffee per election.
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