Young voters must step up

If voting was easy, there’d be no need for election campaigns to test competing ideas, strict rules to protect the integrity of ballots or time-worn procedures to make the results work.

Instead, we’d just point and click.

Thankfully, democracy is a little more complicated than liking someone on Facebook. It requires personal responsibility, thought and a modicum of effort to seal the deal at the ballot box.

Tell that to millennials, the under-30 age group singled out in a recent report by Samara Canada, Message Not Delivered, that tries to debunk what it calls the myth of apathetic young voters. It effectively concludes the young don’t vote because politicians don’t do enough to reach out to them.

Provocative but ultimately Pollyannaish, the report by the charity dedicated to rejuvenating civic engagement raises worthy themes — among them the relative disparity in the attention political leaders pay different age groups.

But when it comes to young voters, the report glosses over a harsh truth: You can lead a horse to water, here meaning the ballot box, but you can’t make it drink.

Only about 61 per cent of eligible Canadians voted in the last federal election in 2011, little better than the record-low 59 per cent in 2008 and far off the 70- to 80 per cent range before 1993.

Last time, among the youngest voters, the turnout was even worse: About four in 10.

Samara tells us the young are more engaged in public life, on average, than older Canadians, using measures beyond voting, yet aren’t contacted by political parties or candidates or politicians like older voters are. That could be the proverbial squeaky wheel at work, but Samara’s take is that youth don’t vote because they’re not invited.

Tempting as it is to blame the political machinery, the problem is surely more nuanced.

Young adults, in many ways, have pushed adolescence into their 20s. Should we be surprised, then, when they fail, by not voting, to grasp the chance to influence their self-interests, or those of their nation? If they want to be wooed, they have only to visit the social media sites on which they live: Politics thrives there, too.

And, with almost non-stop voting now allowed in federal campaigns — by mail, at hundreds of Elections Canada offices before the election, in advance polls and on election day — true ballot barriers are few.

In the end, not voting is a personal choice — no different for a student than for a senior.

No invitation or app can fix that.