In 100 of the 308 ridings in the 2011 election, the National Register of Electors contained more entries than the number of Canadian citizens age 18 or older – the only people eligible to cast a ballot – estimated in the National Household Survey conducted the same year, a Citizen analysis has found. Most of these ridings with discrepancies were in Quebec.
Elections Canada contends that the apparent over-representation of eligible voters is due to the way Statistics Canada collects its data, not errors on the voters list.
The figures appear most out-of-whack in the Montreal riding of Westmount-Ville Marie, where Elections Canada considered 77,656 voters eligible. That was 14-per-cent more than the 68,100 Canadian citizens of voting age who lived in the riding, according to the NHS.
The true over-representation is likely even higher, because not all of the 77,656 voting-age citizens in the riding would be registered to vote.
The Montreal riding of Outremont, represented by NDP leader Tom Mulcair, had 11 per cent more eligible voters than the NHS would suggest, while in Liberal leader Justin Trudeau’s adjacent Papineau riding, the apparent over-representation was about four per cent.
The National Register of Electors is provided to all the federal parties and is key to their efforts to identify potential supporters and get them to the ballot box on election day. In the next election, scheduled for October 2015, accuracy of the voters list will be even more crucial as the parties adopt the “Big Data” techniques used in the U.S. to microtarget individual supporters.
Keeping track of potential voters is a complicated process, however. Elections Canada says that every year, three million residents move their homes, 200,000 die, 400,000 citizens reach voting age and another 120,000 become citizens eligible to vote.
“When updating lists, the lapse of time between the demographic change and the time the information is provided to and processed by Elections Canada results in a slight over-coverage,” said spokesman John Enright in an email.
Elections Canada builds the Register of Electors from federal and provincial “administrative sources,” including information submitted voluntarily by tax filers, and from the provinces’ and territories’ own electoral lists.
Numbers for Quebec may be higher because the provincial government automatically adds youth turning 18 to the list, which is then passed on to Elections Canada.
The agency says over-coverage can also be caused, in part, by the design of the National Household Survey, which does not sample institutions such as prisons or old-age homes, and is subject to the inherent under-coverage of the census, which lowballs the population by an estimated 2.71 per cent nationally.
“It is important to understand that the figures from the NHS are estimates and not counts, and thus may be higher or lower than the true figure,” Enright said.
Still, the accuracy of the NHS estimates on citizenship figures are high. Statistics Canada clocks its standard error – “the coefficient of variance” – at 0.026 per cent in Ontario. Breakdowns of the error rate at the riding level, which are likely higher, are not available.
Elections Canada calls an accurate voters list “the cornerstone of any democracy” and claims its list exceeds its own target levels for accuracy. By November 2013, the register included 92 per cent of all eligible voters, and had their correct addresses 82 per cent of the time, according to the agency’s estimates (exceeding its 90 per cent and 80 per cent targets, respectively).
The agency is currently conducting a study to identify problems with the list. The agency has hired two research companies, Circum Network and Malatest & Associates, to survey 50,000 people chosen from the list at random, to assess its accuracy.
The voluntary NHS replaced the long-form census in 2011 and has been subject to concerns about its accuracy. Statistics Canada says about 70 per cent of households completed the survey.
Their responses were then mathematically projected on to the total population determined by the mandatory census to calculate, for example, the number of citizens of voting age living in each riding.
In areas with lower response rates to the NHS, these projected data may be less reliable.
In more than 200 ridings, Elections Canada recorded fewer registered electors than age-18+ citizens – a more likely circumstance, as not everyone registers to vote.
Nationwide, the total figure isn’t far off. Elections Canada said 24.3 million people were eligible to vote in 2011, and the NHS found there were about 25.5 million voting-age citizens.
Original Article
Source: canada.com/
Author: BY GLEN MCGREGOR
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