Stats Can’t
Numbed by numbers game
BY Terence Dick
Photography by Molly Crealock
On election night, after somehow reconciling myself to the notion that a Conservative minority can’t be all that bad, I tried to make sense of the evening’s proceedings. Five hours of fractally split screens spitting numbers on a constantly rotating and updated basis left me feeling even more estranged from the electoral process than I thought possible. It’s no wonder that voter turnout is so universally awful. TV’s quantitative graphics are just the culmination of weeks of newspaper headlines shouting incremental differences in polling stats and competing percentages indicating the tidal direction. In my state of advanced media-saturated alienation, every new batch of numbers just seemed to render my vote less and less significant.
Every day in the two months leading up to January 23, the headlines were statistics. There weren’t just ratios charting each party’s approval rating, but a calculus of different constituents reduced to numbers: single mothers, former Liberal Maritimers, French-speaking westerners, new immigrants of voting age under 30, and so on. The country was cut up into any number of quantifiable categories, each one split through half a dozen teams (PC, Liberal, NDP, Bloc, other, undecided).
The election was less like a horse race than an immense sudoku square; getting the numbers to add up would reveal the balance of power. But each day the numbers were different and so, each day, the country tried to figure out how to fill in the blanks. Desperate for content, I’d have to rifle through the pages, past more stats and photo-ops and man-on-the-streeters to find some explanation of the issues (usually buried in an opinion piece).
Thinking of the national election as a big game or some kind of sport is only exacerbated by the prominence given to statistical surveys throughout the media. What does it really tell me that the Conservatives are gaining a lead? What does it tell me that the Liberals are losing support? Specifically, what does it tell me as a voter? The bug bear of this election—at least for me, unhappily ensconced in a left-leaning riding deep in the heart of “guns, drugs and gangs” country (a.k.a. downtown Toronto) that wrestles over whether voting NDP constitutes a helping hand to the Conservatives—is the strategy of strategic voting. Like many people in the country, I finally gave up on the idea that my vote only mattered as a way to negate another vote.
This unhealthy and undemocratic mindset emerges from the belief that the election is some sort of massive match of Xs and Os. Should I really have gone against my better interests just to keep worser interests from winning out? Sure, if you consider politics a game with everyone’s eyes on the prize. But that, in the end, would make my vote meaningless. Or more succinctly, the reasons for voting become specious: all I’m really doing is filling in the blanks.
What one loses in getting lost in these numbers is a sense of the immediate meaning of the electoral process. Lucky for me I live in a riding where the candidate greets people on the streets, comes to my door and takes the time to talk. If it weren’t for my new MP (yay!) Peggy Nash, I might have forgotten that a riding is more than a pawn in the battle for leadership. Without her, I might have remained convinced that my vote didn’t matter because the statistics I heard told me not to bother. With newspapers professing results on a daily basis weeks to come before the vote, it’s not surprising a lot of people don’t bother to cast a ballot.
When you see the numbers, the conclusion seems foregone—which means we forget the idea that democracy isn’t a game we play once every four years but an ongoing engagement with the issues at every level. I know I’m not alone in thinking this; at least four out of every 10 Canadians stayed home on January 23, and don’t tell me it was because of the weather. People think statistics tell them how things really are. That might be news, but it’s not the truth.
