Young voters deserve better
Organizing polling stations across Canada and finding volunteers to run them for a snap election in the midst of a pandemic is no easy feat.
But the fact that Elections Canada decided to lighten its load by cancelling its Vote on Campus program is a lamentable lesson for young people.
Parents, teachers, community leaders, politicians and host of other well-meaning older folk (editorial writers included) like to tell youth that they are the future. We tell them their opinions matter, that they can make a difference in the world, and then we urge them to take up their civic duty and vote.
Vote on Campus was designed to make voting easier for many young people, and therefore more likely. It reduced barriers to voting by giving students, who are often studying far from home, the opportunity to cast a special ballot for their home riding or update their address to vote in the campus riding.
Elections Canada launched the program in 2015 and expanded it in 2019 as part of efforts to increase turnout among young people, which is worrisomely low compared to older voters.
Yet those campus voting stations won’t be open on Sept. 20. Elections Canada says the combination of the COVID-19 pandemic and the uncertainty of the election date given the minority government was too much for it to deal with. It said it needed more certainty to plan for campus stations.
A pandemic election does create new challenges and more work for everyone involved. We just need to look at the unusual items the federal agency purchased in preparation for this election — more than 18 million surgical masks, 580,000 bottles of hand sanitizer, 126,000 Plexiglas shields and 16 million single-use pencils — to know that.
But those challenges apply to the entire election; they’re not specific to voting on a university or college campus.
And there’s no way Elections Canada would have given up so easily on a voting program targeted at seniors, for example.
It treated the youth program as dispensable. It will be an incredible shame if this reverses any of the good work that the agency and others have done to try and bring more young people into the democratic process.
Many university and college students are just now finding out that they won’t easily be able to cast a ballot on campus. But Elections Canada made its decision back in the fall of 2020. That was long before the prime minister went to the Governor General and asked for this quickie 36-day campaign.
That means the agency abandoned the program even before it knew the election date or what the timing challenges might be. Elections Canada decided it needed to divert resources to ensure “safe services for the electorate as a whole,” a spokesperson told CBC News.
How’s that for a lesson to youth? You matter, just not that much right now, or at least not as much as others.
The problem with all this is not just that some university students will find it harder to vote on Sept. 20. It’s that they may not vote at all, and possibly not for years to come.
“Voting is habit-forming: if a person votes in their first election, they will probably be a lifelong voter.”
That statement is from an Elections Canada document on youth voting trends.
Certainly, there still are ways for students away at school to vote. Student organizations and voting advocacy groups will no doubt do their best to inform students of their options, including advance voting and voting by mail.
But Elections Canada should also have done its best for these students. Instead, it let them down.