Voter turnout worse than it seems

The handwringing about plummeting voter turnout in Canada is legitimate, but not all the blame can be placed at the feet of the disengaged, slothful voter in this country.

This year has been remarkable for the number of federal, provincial and territorial elections, but it will also be recorded as the year of the status quo.

Status quo, if you are seeking re-election, means bland, allergic to big new ideas, a tip-toe to voting day so as not to disturb the voter, not a parade led by a brass band.

While it is too much to expect that more inspiring politicians and more inspiring campaigns would spark a stampede to the polls, votes that do not promise change are votes that do not create excitement.

The year of the incumbent also means the year of voter suppression — not in the sinister, underhanded way the term implies — but a year of governing parties happy to keep turnout low because, historically, low turnout means advantage to the incumbent.

It also explains why any radical overhaul of the voting system is met with such indifference by incumbent governments, which have just benefited from an existing system that lets the sleeping voter lie.

These factors ride shotgun with a lack of anger in this country in 2011.

Whether this contentment is misplaced or not is certainly a matter for debate, but a lack of anger plays to the collective shrug we are seeing during successive campaigns this year.

Then there is the sense that individual votes lack weight in our first-past-the-post system.

Votes for third or fourth parties are often seen as wasted ballots and help explain why the NDP and the Green Party routinely underperform on election day in relation to the popular vote recorded by pollsters.

It also helps explain why young voters, more likely to back those two parties, have the worst voter turnout rate in the country.

These are all potential rationales for declining turnout, but that is not to say there should not be cause for alarm.

In Ontario, Elections Ontario offered voters so much in the way of advance polling — assisted voting, mail voting and special ballot voting — that it stopped just short of delivering the ballot to your couch between periods of the hockey game.

And still, only 49 per cent voted last Thursday.

Drill down a bit and you learn that the 37 per cent of votes won by Dalton McGuinty means Ontario elected a premier with the support of slightly more than 18 per cent of eligible voters.

Other votes in Prince Edward Island, Manitoba and the Northwest Territories have all shown the same, disturbing trend.

Even Alberta Progressive Conservatives chose Alison Redford as the province’s new premier with just 57 per cent of the turnout recorded on the second ballot at its 2006 leadership vote.

Federally, turnout actually ticked up slightly to 61.4 per cent in May, but that was still the third lowest turnout in history — all three of them recorded since 2000.

But if you take the number of Canadians of voting age who actually voted, a formula studied by the Swedish International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance (IDEA), the numbers are even more dismal.

No Canadian election since 1993 has involved more than 60 per cent of those of voting age, as opposed to the smaller number that were actually registered to vote.

In 2008, that number was 53.59, according to IDEA, then 53.79 in 2011, the two lowest numbers in Canadian history.

These are trends that must be seriously addressed in this country.

But on the upside, for those who believe in the old adage that if you don’t vote, you can’t complain, it should be a quiet four years ahead.

Origin
Source: Toronto Star