SASKATOON - At least 7,000 Canadians have made online matches and promises to swap ballots in Tuesday's federal election.
Mat Savelli of Hamilton, Ont., founder of the "Anti-Harper Vote Swap Canada" group on Facebook, says the numbers have surpassed his expectations.
"I'm optimistic that we might help to swing a riding, but I'm certainly not delusional in thinking that we're going to decide this election," says Savelli, who is voting abroad while working on his PhD in history at Oxford University in England.
His website group, created four weeks ago, encourages people to swap votes to stop Stephen Harper and the Conservatives from winning a majority government.
Of the site's 13,000 members, about 5,000 have agreed to swap votes, he says.
Another website called votepair.ca has set up another 2,000 matches, says creator Gerry Kirk, a web technologist from Sault Ste. Marie, Ont.
He says his site is non-partisan and has even attracted some Conservative voters to sign up.
"If you're a Conservative in Toronto, you're just as screwed as a Liberal or NDP in Alberta," Kirk says.
Both sites have special computer applications, much like online dating services, that have matched voters across the country using party preferences and ridings where votes are likely to matter the most.
The deadline for registering was last week, but both groups extended that amid a rush of last-minute members.
Jenna Little, a paralegal from Mississauga, Ont., was one of the first voters to sign up on the Facebook site in September. After a month of reflection, she's sticking to her plan.
Little says she wants to vote for the Green party. But because she believes the Greens don't have a shot in her riding, which is tight between the Conservatives and Liberals, she's going to vote for the Grits.
In exchange, a woman in London, Ont. -- a Liberal supporter -- agreed to cast a Green ballot for Little and already voted at an advance poll.
"She messaged me the other day saying she'd voted and, `Good luck and I hope this works."'
Little said she has eagerly persuaded her sisters, friends and co-workers to swap as well.
Elections Canada has investigated the vote-swapping scheme and declared it legal. But the agency issued a warning that no one knows for sure how people cast their ballots once they're in the voting booth.
Other websites have popped up to endorse strategic voting. Voteforenvironment.ca, for example, encourages Canadians to vote for environmental candidates with the best chance of winning their riding.
Savelli says vote swapping is a more formalized and democratic form of strategic voting.
"It still allows people to support the parties that they want to support. Because we're not saying to people, `Oh, just vote Liberal. Hope that it all works out.' We're saying, `If you want to support the Green party, then you're going to get a chance to."'
While a few thousand swapped votes spread out across 308 ridings across the country may not amount to much on election day, Savelli and Kirk both agree their long-term goal is to create buzz for electoral reform.
"It goes to show we need a real solution not a Band-Aid on a festering wound," says Kirk.
He says he's a proponent of proportional representation in which the popular vote determines how many seats a party gets in the House of Commons.
Kirk is also a member of Fair Vote Canada, a group calling for a national referendum on changes to the election system.
Fair Vote sponsors the orphanvoters.ca website, which talks about "an uncaring electoral system" and describes the "democratically neglected, abused and abandoned citizens who find the doors of Parliament slammed in their faces because their votes elected no one."
The site is running a "Great Democracy Disaster Contest" offering $2,300 in cash prizes to those who can predict the number of orphan votes across the country, in each province and in each riding.
It claims there were 7,584,409 votes cast in the 2006 election that elected no one.
