Grimes rocks the vote

She has DJ’d for partygoers on the USS Midway, toured with Lana Del Ray,and regularly fills up tents at music festivals.

Now Canadian electronic star Grimes – a.k.a Claire Boucher – is urging her fellow citizens to fill up the polling stations on Oct. 19 in a last-ditch effort to boot out Stephen Harper, by voting strategically in a list of 16 key swing ridings that she has posted on her tumblr.com site, where the Conservatives are vulnerable to voters desiring change.

“I’d really like to encourage all Canadians to vote in the upcoming federal election, which may be one of the most important in Canada’s history,” said Grimes in a 15-second video post on Tumblr.

She said that strategic voting was key to overthrowing Harper, as the Liberals and NDP are splitting the progressive vote, which she said allowed the Conservatives to gain a majority.

Eight ridings that the Liberals can win include the Ontario battlegrounds of Brampton Centre, Aurora-Oak Ridges-Richmond Hill, Bay of Quinte, Haldimand-Norfolk, King-Vaughan, Vaughan-Woodbridge, Northumberland-Peterborough South, and St. John-Rothesay in New Brunswick.

The second eight that the NDP can claim from the Tories are Coquitlam-Port Coquitlam, Cariboo-Prince George, Mission-Matsqui, and North Okanagan-Shuswap in B.C., Regina-Qu-Appelle in Saskatchewan, Edmonton Griesbach in Alberta, and Essex in Ontario.

“It’s so important that everyone vote in the upcoming election. Harper threatens poor Canadians, arts funding, refuses to look into the Missing and Murdered Indigenous women and seems to have a deep allegiance to the oil industry (among a million other things). I know a lot of you don’t believe in democracy or voting, but so much of what we hold dear as Canadians is under threat,” said Grimes in a post on her Tumblr page.

Boucher has been making music under the alter-ego 'Grimes' since 2009, specializing in "home-brewed electronic music that is irreducibly weird but insistently pop, a term that describes both its sound and, increasingly, its reception," according to her New Yorker profile.

Canadians pumped for Harper’s ‘Going Away Party’

As Grimes prepares to rock the vote, hundreds of thousands of Canadians have signed up on Facebook to celebrate the ‘Stephen Harper Going Away Party’ on Oct. 19, which they can do with a celebratory drink or just a high five.

This event has gained 270,167 attendees as of 15:47 EDT – roughly 32,000 more likes than the prime minister’s own Facebook page – and the number of partygoers aiming to celebrate Harper’s last day is climbing rapidly.

But such a result depends on voting, which Canadians have done in record numbers at advance polls held across the country from Oct. 9 – 12.

According to statistics published online by Elections Canada, a total of 1,642,000 people cast ballots over the first two days of advance polling, an increase of 34 per cent over the 1,223,000 electors who showed up over the same time period during the 2011 election.

A further 767,000 voters cast ballots on Sunday, bringing the recorded total to 2.4 million, still 16 per cent higher than the 2,077,000 votes recorded over the first three days of advance polls in 2011.

For more information on how to cast a vote and what documents to bring to the polling station, visit the Elections Canada website.