Why I Didn't Vote, 2010

(I mentioned on Twitter that I wasn't going to vote, and some folks asked why. Since this is a complicated issue that won't fit into 140 characters, I wrote it up here and linked to it.)

I have been eligible to vote since the federal general election of 1988. Since that time I have voted in every election I was eligible to do so in, with the exception of the 2010 Municipal Election.

Why?

First, let me distract you with some irrelevancies.

The problem with elections is that just anyone can run. Anyone who has made a career of public service suddenly becomes a "career politician", something which is considered a negative label by the electorate. Ignorance seems a virtue.

The problem with election campaigns is that there are very few new ideas. Most of the platform planks which come up are either incredibly simplistic (ie zero-means-zero), incredibly naiive (ie LRT on Carling), impossible (throwing out all the collective barganing agreements the city has with the unions), illegal (several (usually fringe) candidates always want to do things that are the responsibility of other levels of government), or incredibly vague (ie being in favor of delivering the LRT tunnel on time and on budget, except if it is going to cost too much, in which case we'll scrap it and start from scratch again).

The problem with candidates is that there is, at the end of the day, very little to differentiate most of them apart. So the natural inclination is to pick on real or perceived character flaws of other candidates, blow them out of proportion, and then loudly say, "I'm not like him(*)." US politics, especially presidential politics, is almost exclusively about the "not him" gambit. The federal conservative parties turned this into an electable strategy after the Reform and PC parties merged. It has worked so well that the federal Liberals have now abandoned any semblance of policy development and will now throw all their efforts into the same "not him" strategy.

The problem with elections overall is that all of this is blown up into a firestorm by the media. Candidates prance for the media, who feed back into the whole mess by paying attention and then instigating conflict. This is the reason why the "not him" strategy works: because it is short and simple enough for a soundbite or a five paragraph article. They then tie this up with demands that the candidates possess "vision", which seems to be code for "large projects mostly funded by tax money" (see also Landsdown, the tunnel...).

The problem with the actual act of voting is that there is no way for the electorate to register their displeasure with the options being offered. Ideally there would be some way to show up and decline the ballot in such a way that the declined ballots would be counted and listed along side the number of votes for each candidate. That way you could compare the number of votes for any candidate with the number of voters who cared enough to get involved but didn't like any of the options.

Right now a dissatisfied voter has three options:

• they can skip voting entirely, which makes them look like they don't care;
• they can deliberately spoil their ballot, which makes them look like an idiot; or
• they can vote for someone they don't want to win, which makes them an idiot.

When we vote, we are putting a vote for someone. This is an implied endorsement of at least something they have, be it their ideas, their record, even the order their name is presented on the ballot.

As such, I feel very strongly that campaigns and platforms need to be for something. Being "I'm not him" is not being for something.

We are not (or should not be) voting against someone. We can only vote for someone.

So all that said, we come back to why I didn't vote this time around: I did not think there was any person or collection of ideas that I wanted to vote for.

Mr. Watson is a career politician, and as such he left himself plenty of wiggle room on his promises. So he'll do what it is feasable to do. This is a safe and practical position to have. The problem is he hasn't differentiated between what he'd like to do verses what is most likely to be dropped, ie what the priorities are if there isn't enough money in the budget to do everything (and there isn't). There isn't any substance to him. And he's bailed on jobs before, leaving municipal politics to run provincially, and then leaving his ministerial job with the governing Liberals to come back to us fine folk.

Mr. Doucett never made many bones about not caring much for the suburbs, and since my place of residence (Morgan's Grant, north North Kanata) is the embodiment of sprawl,
I got the impression that he really didn't have anything for me and wasn't going to bother to try. (See this discussion I put into #NCR about Mr. Doucett's platform and sprawl in general.) His LRT-down-Carling idea was willful blindness in terms of what is actually achievable with a bureaucracy involved, and his constant windmill-tilting at the Landsdown plan was tiring. His inconsistancy in how unchallengable council decisions should be (ie absolute when it came to the OMB, except where he disagreed with it as in the tunnel and Landsdown). His vision of the city seemed to be restricted to the Glebe (and a downtown without a LRT tunnel).

Mr. O'Brien... well, after "Zero Means Zero", what more needs to be said? The only positive I can think of is that council operated very smoothly while he was on trial, and he managed a budget consensus -- the only problem being it was a consensus that totally ignored him.

None of the other candidates could even be taken seriously as someone you would actively want to see in the Mayor's chair.

So given all that, who am I supposed to vote for? Seriously. Voting for someone I don't like proves me an idiot.

For all my talk about making a protest vote, I couldn't do it in the end, it felt dishonest.

And since the turn-out was less than 50% this time, I'm clearly not alone.

The bottom line here is that the huge number of people who didn't vote represent a enormous failure on the part of the candidates and their platforms. They failed to attract the interest of those who didn't care, and they failed to meet the standards of those of us who cared and paid attention but found them lacking.

To suggest that since I didn't vote means that I don't have a right to complain over the next four years is ridiculous. As a home owner, I pay taxes, and that is what gives me the right to complain. You wouldn't suggest that since I didn't vote I no longer have the expectation of garbage pickup, would you?

To suggest that I don't take the privilege of voting seriously, that I don't respect the sacrifice of those who worked, fought, and in some cases died for that privilege, is insulting to me and those who gained me that privilege. I am not hiding behind excuses like "I'm too busy" or "I don't care". I have paid attention to the campaigns and considered things very closely and seriously. I daresay that in deciding to not to vote, I spent far more time with this issue than some who did vote.

To suggest that I should throw that vote away by spoiling the ballot, or voting for someone I don't want to, strikes me as insulting to those who gained me that privilege. Participation in governance like this is something to be taken very seriously, and the suggestion that a vote be wasted -- in any way -- tries to oversimplify and trivialize the entire process.

This was the first time I didn't vote, but I suspect it won't be the last. My previous vote was a protest vote for the Green Party, and it left me feeling dishonest. I'm not going to pretend that politics is any different than it was when I was younger, but I do know that my tolerance for it has gone way down.

And the way of the present seems to be to have more spectacularly less qualified candidates (Mr. O'Brien, Mr. Ford) which cater an overly simplistic and totally undeliverable message to the masses who want simple solutions to complicated problems.

I am not optimistic for the future, since nobody has the vision to make me so.

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* == Statistically it is going to be a him. Totally different issue.

On Suburbs

(This is a thinly edited IRC rant I put into #NCR this week.)

Doucet became clearer to me once I realized he doesn't care if I vote for him since he's not interested in doing anything for me as a Kanata resident. Which perhaps paradoxically means he's a safe protest vote, since none of Larry, Jim, or Andy do it for me.

Suburbs are a hard problem. But since we pay taxes too, we have to be part of the solution. You can't just go around wringing your hands and saying "sprawl is evil", you have to make incentives for sprawlers to de-sprawl and you have to make sure the de-sprawlers don't lose their shirt while doing so.

Also, there are reasons why people live out here:

1) it is nicer than the city
2) it is cheaper than the city
3) it is quieter than the city

...and trying to make the rest of the city into a Glebe clone isn't going to solve ANY of those problems.

The Glebe is unique:

- it is close to the city
- but it isn't super dense

...basically it is a suburb that was pre-sprawl sprawl that Ottawa expanded to envelope.

The problem I have with Doucett's transit plan is that it is masquarading as two plans. A line that does commuter rail from Kanata into the core is not going to serve local on/off traffic down Carling. It is a one-or-the-other. I mean, look at how frickin' long it takes the 85 to go from downtown to Bayshore (or maybe I'm dating myself with that comment? does teh 85 still do that run?) whereas an express from kanata lakes is 60 minutes.

Or was, anyways.

I don't want to know how long it is from Morgan's Grant, it is something I've never had to do.

Bottom line, Doucett's look-how-great-the-Glebe-is campaign doesn't sell out here in Kanata. But it looks like it doesn't sell in most places, so, like I said earlier, it makes him a safe protest vote.


...and heck, if he does pull an NDP victory: he can't be any worse than Larry was, since I doubt council will listen to him, either.

</lecture>

Monetizing A Hobby

(Crossposted to the hockey blog.)

Mr. Myers at Sens Army Blog is obviously looking at the internet with a bit of jealousy in his heart these days, and is wondering why he shouldn't get paid to do the work he does.

I'll be up front: I'm picking on Mr. Myers here both because his article happened to come up in my RSS reader, and because he's been here before (see I'm Selling Out And Need Your Feedback).

As a freelance writer, Mr. Myers has every right to set both the expectation of compensation for his submissions, as well as the price he wishes to charge for that work. However, nobody is under any obligation to pay that price, with the resultant penalty that either those potential readers have to do without reading his work, or new work doesn't get created because Mr. Myers is off doing something else that someone is willing to pay him to do.

And that's the key.

The undercurrent to my reply to Mr. Myers' first go-around was "you can't sell out if nobody's buying". And the same rationale should be presented here, as well.

Economically, prices are set by willing seller selling to willing buyer. When the buyer in this case is looking at the supply of "writing done by Mr. Myers", the supply is sharply limited and Mr. Myers has a natural monopoly on this very narrow market. If the market in question is "Senators bloggers of a quality better than 'fanboys with little insight to give(*)'", the market is somewhat wider, and populated with people who will participate for no monetary compensation. Given that, the potential buyer would be foolish to pay for something he can get for free.

On the other side, the economics of internet businesses are still somewhat hand-wavey. The golden years of being paid non-fractional-dollars for low-thousand-impressions are long gone. Even a thousand viewers will add very little in the way to immediate bottom-line revenue to an internet business (see also Mr. Myer's response to my comment on his older article). So from an immediate revenue sharing angle, there is not much in the way of immediate revenue to share.

So it is unfortunate that the market has decided that the immediate value of "sports blogging" is so low that it averages out to might-as-well-be-zero for all but the highest end of the market(**).

But that's economics for you.

People who try to blog for money are like those setting up in the restaurant business. The vast majority of independent restaurants or clubs fail to last even one year before the original owner runs out of money. Done well, it is a lot of work, and even high quality writing is not necessarily a guarantee of success since the problem of attracting an audience in the sea of noise that is out there.

Or perhaps a more apt comparison would be to compare professional bloggers to professional actors. Hundreds show up at a cattle call for a single part; and most parts don't pay very well. The percentage of people who manage to make any money doing it is very small; the percentage of them who make their living is also small; and the percentage of those who get rich doing it is microscopic.

I blog because it is interesting to me at times. I'm never going to make any money doing this and I'll probably never be regularly read by anyone other than Google's search engine and myself.

You should blog because you are interested in something or passionate about something. But just having those credentials is no guarantee that you'll be able to make a living doing it.

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(*) = so coined by Pension Plan Puppets during Toronto Star Gate. And yes, I'm under no delusion that I would fall into any other category for any of my blogs.

(**) = One of my wife's writing magazines had this tidbit in it on blogging: only the top 10% of blogs make any money. And the average annual revenue for that 10% is $19K. And keep in mind that the income from blogs does not scale linearly with the increase in popularity through that 10%.

The Herd Effect

Wandering through Toronto, you can't help but hear the horror in the realization that this Rob Ford has a 43% rating in the popularity polls leading up to the Toronto mayoral election this fall. This election is his to lose, even if he's been trying hard to lose it.

I had two realizations about this.

First, if Toronto is anything like Ottawa then what is going to happen is that largely the same councilors will be re-elected, resulting in a populist mayor who is both an idiot and largely ignored by council. Ford will end up saying a lot of silly things but having no real effect on what happens in the city -- except that if he runs for re-election in four years, he'll take credit for anything positive which happens in the meantime.

Ottawa's been here already, and his name is Larry O'Brien.

Secondly, it occurs to me that this is what happens when the previously disinterested population gets interested in politics -- they get attracted to the bright shiny(*) who offers them simplistic solutions to complicated problems, and they vote as a herd.

Maybe the intellectual elite need to re-think this whole "engaging the voters" thing.

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(*) = no judgment on hairstyles implied.

Jazz vs. Bowling

Seth Godin on Jazz vs Bowling:

when we get to work, most of us choose to bowl.

Thing is, we're making bowling scores here, so it doesn't matter how good a jazz player we might be.

Watson: overestimating the public's electoral awareness

Watson, on Zero-means-zero:

The public understands that there is a cost associated with living in a civilized and caring society.

The fact that they elected Mayor Larry suggests that maybe they don't, or at least they don't care and want the hurting in their wallets to stop.

I Like BOB-TV

But more importantly, Alex likes Bob-TV.

Reasons why Bob-TV is better than The Wiggles:

• Although they are both music shows, the Bob-TV is better music.
• Having Bob-TV on in the background is like having the radio on from when I was going to school.
• Most importantly it takes Alex three hours to watch all three Bob-TV episodes in the PVR rather than only the one hour required to exhaust the Wiggles episodes in the PVR.

One of the current crop of Bob-TV episodes in our PVR includes Rush's Tom Sawyer in them.