Tactical Voting - Examples in Real Elections

Examples in Real Elections

One high-profile example of tactical voting was the California gubernatorial election, 2002. During the Republican primaries, Republicans' Richard Riordan (former mayor of Los Angeles) and Bill Simon (a self-financed businessman) were vying for a chance to compete against the unpopular incumbent Democratic Governor of California, Gray Davis. Polls predicted that Riordan would defeat Davis, while Simon would not.

At that time, the Republican primaries were open primaries in which anyone could vote regardless of her or his own party affiliation, Davis supporters were rumored to have voted for Simon because Riordan was perceived as a greater threat to Davis; this combined with a negative advertising campaign by Davis describing Riordan as a "big-city liberal", and Simon ultimately won the primary despite a last-minute business scandal. However, he lost the election against Davis; discontent soon led to the recall.

In the 1997 UK general election, Democratic Left helped Bruce Kent set up GROT - Get Rid Of Them - a tactical voter campaign whose sole aim was to help prevent the Conservative Party from gaining a 5th term in office. This coalition was drawn from individuals in all the main opposition parties and many who were not aligned with any party. While it would be hard to prove that GROT swung the election itself, it did attract significant media attention and brought tactical voting into the mainstream for the first time in UK politics. In 2001, the Democratic Left's successor organisation the New Politics Network organised a similar campaign tacticalvoter.net. Since then tactical voting has become a real consideration in British politics as is reflected in by-elections and by the growth in sites such as tacticalvoting.com who encourage tactical voting as a way of defusing the two party system and empowering the individual voter. In the 2005 UK General Election individuals set up tacticalvoting.net to balance the tactical voting debate.

In the Ontario general election, 1999, strategic voting was widely encouraged by opponents of the Progressive Conservative government of Mike Harris. This failed to unseat Harris, and succeeded only in suppressing the New Democratic Party vote to a historic low.

In the Canadian general election, 2004 and to a lesser extent in the Canadian general election, 2006, strategic voting was a concern for the federal New Democratic Party. In the 2004 election, the governing Liberal Party was able to convince many New Democratic voters to vote Liberal in order to avoid a Conservative government. In the 2006 elections, the Liberal Party attempted the same strategy, with Prime Minister Paul Martin asking New Democrats and Greens to vote for the Liberal Party in order to prevent a Conservative win. The New Democratic Party leader Jack Layton would respond by asking voters to "lend" their votes to his party, suggesting that the Liberal Party would be bound to lose the election regardless of strategic voting.

In the 2006 local elections in London, tactical voting is being promoted by sites such as London Strategic Voter in a response to national and international issues. The question of whether this approach acts to undermine local democracy is receiving much debate.

In Northern Ireland, it is widely believed that (predominantly Protestant) Unionist voters in Nationalist strongholds have voted for the Social Democratic and Labour Party (SDLP) to prevent Sinn Féin from capturing such seats. This conclusion was reached by comparing results to the demographics of constituencies and polling districts.

In Hong Kong, with its largest remainder method with the Hare quota, voters supporting candidates of the pro-democracy camp will organise to cast their votes to different tickets, so as to avoid votes being concentrated on one or a few candidates and wasted.

Puerto Rico's 2004 elections were affected by tactical voting. The New Progressive Party's candidate was unpopular, except among the pro-statehood Right, because of large corruption schemes and privatization of public corporations. To prevent him from winning, other factions supported the Partido Popular Democratico's candidate. The elections were close; statehood advocates won a seat in the U.S. house of representatives and majorities in both legislative branches, but lost governance to Anibal Acevedo Vila. (In Puerto Rico you have the chance to vote by party or by candidate. Separatists voted under their ideology, but for the center party's candidate. This caused major turmoil.) After a recount and a trial, Anibal Acevedo Vila was certified as governor of the commonwealth of Puerto Rico.

In 2011 Slovenian parliamentary election, 30% of voters voted tactically. Public polls predicted easy win for Janez Janša, the candidate of the Slovenian Democratic Party, however his opponent Zoran Janković, the candidate of Positive Slovenia won. According to prominent Slovenian public opinion researchers, such proportions of tactical voting were not recorded anywhere else before.