Big election disappointment was voter apathy
My heart broke on election night. Not for who won and lost, but for who didn’t vote. Watching the election results roll in and seeing how low the numbers were was a deflation after months of election tension.
Despite the herculean effort by the City of Toronto’s election services and the 17,000 people working the election on Monday, a virtual army of democracy, all of whom pulled off an election where the rules were unclear until little over a month ago, only 41 per cent of Torontonians bothered to vote.
Contrast that low turnout with the efforts of volunteers who worked to get the vote out for their particular candidate, most of whom didn’t have the faintest chance of winning.
So much effort on one side and so much apathy on the other. Hope and void.
Then there were all those columns, some written by yours truly, making the case for municipal elections and governance and why it all matters.
“Closest to your day-to-day lives,” so many of us wrote, to little result.
It all feels like a civics failure, but it’s a regular failure as low voter turnout is a perennial phenomenon and most acutely felt at the municipal level, with the lowest participation of all three levels of government.
There’s low turnout even when the stakes are incredibly high, as they are now, and when one or more of the crises facing the city, such as transit or housing, touches everyone.
In 2014, Toronto saw a spike in turnout with a record-setting 60 per cent. For that we can thank the unprecedented drama of the Rob Ford era, when Toronto city hall was, briefly, world famous.
In a way, Rob Ford was a great civics motivator.
It’s likely Doug Ford’s chaosinducing attack on local democracy drove participation back down, perhaps by design.
The low turn out is also confounding considering how easy it is to vote here. Voting in Canada, municipal elections and up, is painless and easy. That isn’t universal; just look at the conditions south of the border with a variety of complicated voting mechanisms and other, more scandalous, barriers to voting. Here, we rarely have to give the process a thought, and for that we should be grateful.
Some jurisdictions in Ontario have made it even easier to vote by allowing people to do so electronically, either online or over the phone. In Sarnia, where polls were open from Oct. 11, allowing 12 days to vote, the result was nearly 50 per cent, the highest voter turnout since 1994 despite worry new systems might disenfranchise older voters.
The “ranked ballot” initiative is meant to make election results refelect more accurately the votes cast; under it, voters choose their first, second and third choices. The wining candidate must get 50 per cent plus one vote to win.
Across Toronto, just seven of 25 winning councillors received more than 50 per cent of the vote in their ward. Some of the lowest percentages for victory were Frances Nunziata in York South-Weston with 32, John Filion in Willowdale with 31, Gary Crawford in Scarborough Southwest with 36, and Cynthia Lai in Scarborough North with 27. On Monday, London became the first city in Canada to un- dertake an election by ranked ballot and voter turnout was 39 per cent, consistent with the last 20 years in that city, give or take three or four percentage points either way. As low as London’s turnout was, it’s still higher than Mississauga, which saw only 27 per cent of voters coming out. Toronto’s 41 per cent turnout means more people did not vote than voted. Perhaps we should require a quorum or else the election is deemed illegitimate, but then forcing people to vote doesn’t seem like a good idea either.
Does turnout matter though? After every election you’ll hear people say, “if you didn’t vote, I don’t want to hear you complain the next four years.” Although it’s easy to see where the sentiment comes from, it probably does little to convince people who don’t vote to turn out and exercise their franchise. What about all the peo- ple who aren’t allowed to vote, such as teenagers and new Canadians? The latter pay taxes and contribute to the city, but can’t yet vote because municipal voting rights are based on citizenship.
Do they no longer have the right to complain?
For dedicated voters, not voting seems hard to fathom. But there are many reasons why people don’t vote; life is busy and fraught, and voting and its consequences may pale in comparison to other clear and present worries. Finding ways to make personal connections to the act of voting is a continuing challenge. The task is to figure out why people have, in effect, allowed themselves to become disenfranchised.
It’s likely due to reasons connected to some of those bigger problems facing the city.