COSTUMES AT THE POLLS
Attempts to ridicule niqab policy are wrong on many levels, Fo Niemi says.
The recent images of voters showing up at voting stations in different face masks, head coverings and costumes reveal how some Canadians fail to live up to the lessons of our history and the true democratic values enshrined in our Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms.
It is clear that these voters are trying to make a statement about their views and feelings in response to Elections Canada’s policy, in effect for several years now, to allow some Muslim women to vote while wearing their niqab as long as they sign a formal oath regarding their eligibility.
By attempting to ridicule this policy, these voters actually help confirm a unique quality of our voting system: What one wears on one’s face for religious or spurious reasons does not automatically prevent one from voting. The system has ways to require voter identification to avoid fraud.
But by wearing such disguises, these voters do more than trivialize a woman’s faith-based choice and reinforce negative attitudes about Muslims in general and Muslim women in general. They almost make a mockery of our hard-fought right to vote and the compelling duty of each and every person, as well as that of our Parliament, to protect not only our voting rights, but also two core principles of our voting system: integrity and accessibility.
Canadian history is replete with struggles of different classes of people to obtain the right to vote, particularly women, aboriginal peoples, racial minorities (notably, Chinese- and Japanese-Canadians), prisoners, people with disabilities, naturalized citizens (in the 1995 Quebec referendum), and more recently, Canadian expatriates. Through passionate social and political actions, and costly litigation, Canadians have sought to overcome all kinds of barriers, physical and legal, to the exercise of their constitutional right to vote.
As the last province to allow women the right to vote — 75 years ago — Quebec today should remember the battle for universal suffrage, even if voting equality did not truly come true for some people in our province, such as aboriginal people, who only gained this right for provincial elections in 1969.
In this context, any attempt to curtail the voting rights of some women because of their face-covering veil and their faith-based choice, goes against the salient historical trend of widening the access to vote. Voting is the ultimate expression of citizenship and personal empowerment in our body politic. Any woman suspected of being oppressed and coerced by men into wearing the niqab (according to common stereotypes) should not be further marginalized and forced, through state-sanctioned restrictions, to choose between her sincerely-held religious beliefs and her right to vote while veiled.
Quite the contrary. If we are to stay true to our history, not to mention be consistent in supporting women’s rights, we must protect the voting rights of women who wear the niqab, as well as guarantee full and equal access to the voting booth, and to vote, for people with disabilities, seniors, students and people living in isolated regions, to name a few.
Of equal concern with accessibility is the integrity of our electoral system. How quickly Canadians and Quebecers have forgotten about deliberately misleading robocalls and other devious attempts during the 2011 federal election to deprive eligible voters of their right to cast a ballot for the candidate of their choice.
Those who show up in voting stations in Halloween or Comic Con characters, with both veiled and blunt Islamophobic messages, do a disservice to our democracy by mocking certain women’s exercise of their voting rights while neglecting the more serious acts of electoral fraud that took place in 2011.