Fringe votes count the most

Most media treat them as inscrutable mistakes, but smart party campaigners should realize that sizable votes for fringe candidates may hold the key to overall victory, and should look closely at them

Many complaints have been leveled at our national electoral "first-past-the-post" system. More will come following June 28 when pundits compare percentages of the popular vote won by various parties to percentages of seats won by those parties in the resulting Parliament.

Inevitably, larger shares of the popular vote will be rewarded with even larger percentages of seats, while smaller shares of the vote will, like the fate of the Greens, be rewarded not at all.

Thus it is that calls for some form of proportional representation perennially go out, so that smaller parties that win significant votes enjoy some commensurate reward with seats in the House. The assumption is that with the present system, votes cast for candidates who have no hope of winning their seat are entirely wasted votes.

It's absolutely not true. Long after the acceptance speeches have stopped echoing round the gymnasiums and the balloons have shriveled and drifted to the floor, party workers continue to comb finely through the numbers, looking past the winner to the losers, what they stood for, how they spoke, what percentage of votes they attracted, and what trends can be discerned in the results compared to the results in previous elections.

Like everything else in this world, the real action in electoral politics takes place in the margins. All three mainline parties can count on solid bedrock support of some minimum percentage of the electorate. That unwavering support for all established parties together adds up to a vast majority of the voting electorate, leaving a relatively slim slice of uncertain citizens to whom all appeals for votes are made.

In many races, the difference between winning and losing a riding can come down to a smaller number of votes than those who voted for fringe candidates (those with no hope of winning). These should be the most interesting voters to campaigners, because unlike the biggest block of the electorate, they actually were motivated enough to vote, but then voted for someone with no hope.

These are free agents, in that they are obviously not part of any of the mainline party's core support, and more intriguingly still, they proved resistant to all of the mainline party's combined extensive and expensive campaigning.

Political parties are very much operated on a business model these days, and party executives are very aware of how much campaign money was spent to gain each vote cast. More precisely, since most of the campaign is directed at only those relatively few voters not belonging to any of the mainline parties' core supporters, the cost expended per previously-unsecured vote is several times higher.

But if they look at all those votes cast for fringe candidates, they could calculate that those votes were won at virtually no cost, compared to the enormous costs all the parties incurred in a losing effort to win them.

The campaigners should want to know why. The question should cause even more sleeplessness for the members of the campaign team that placed second in a riding, especially where the race was close.

People who don't vote are by now largely dismissed. Those who have their minds made up long before the campaign starts are ignored. Those who are uncertain during the campaign but who then cast a vote for a mainline party are cost-benefit analyzed and filed away. But those who are truly motivated to vote, but then vote for fringe candidates-they are the ones worth studying.

And responding to. It's not that they proved too expensive to reach: no amount of campaign spending could ever have reached them. These were the voters who responded to the candidates' messages.

All too often the media pundits concentrate solely on who won and who nearly won, and dismiss all other votes. As a result, those who are motivated to vote, and vote for fringe candidates, are led to believe by the media that their votes were the least interesting of all, when exactly the opposite is true.

The first-past-the-post system has its limitations, but invalidating the votes cast for no-hopers is not one of them. Second-past-the-post candidates should know that if not for those no-hope votes, they could well have been first. Next time around, after they have studied what appealed to those who voted for fringe candidates, and respond to the desires they have, they might have hopes of picking enough of them up to propel themselves into first place. It might be that those voters who supported fringe candidates liked the humour of one of them. Would it be so damaging to the campaigns, then, if candidates tried a little humour to win them?

For those interested in politics, but fed up with the choices presented at the ballot box and the iniquities of the out-of-date electoral system, and thus choosing not to vote, should consider the potentially positive results when fringe candidates are seen to win more votes than the difference between first and second.

Those planning not to vote should give serious thought to voting for some fringe candidate near them. It'll make the party brass think a lot more about you than will your unused ballot. And if you pick the strangest of the fringe candidates, you can really play with their little heads.

****