13 responses so far ↓

• 1 Bill Lee // Jul 18, 2012 at 1:31 pm

  Interesting speculation.
  And the 8 weeks is about the same as the public release of house assessments.

  In a U.S. state south of here
  Wash. to unveil voter registration on Facebook
  URL: http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/text/2018708620.html

  But the federal government used to put up on local telephone poles (are those poles still around, or is modern Vancouver gone underground) lists of local voters (names, occupations and the like) in the two official languages.
  People generally disliked being so public to nearby neighbours so, eventually (in the days before privacy commissioners) they were cancelled as being too public.
  But the (potential) voters list is still publically available.
  Here Mr. O’Neill is positing a come and view list among other options.

  But what about compulsion to vote? Just like the main census (the Tories didn’t cancel that one because it gives decennial counts to change riding boundaries, to their benefit)

  There is the usual Wiki article with good external links at the bottom
  en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compulsory_voting
  though see the French version for better anecdotal detail
  fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vote_obligatoire

  And the German language version for examples from both Austria and Australia
  de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wahlpflicht

  I am currently reading “Electoral Engineering and Cross-National Turnout Differences: What Role for Compulsory Voting? by Mark N. Franklin in British Journal of Political Science
  Vol. 29, No. 1, Jan., 1999 pages 205-216
  [ http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2307/194302 ]
  Top result of a Google search on “compulsory voting” and the Google Scholar reference. Scanning the “Cited by” links may be more interesting.

  Blekko is less complicated : blekko.com/ws/compulsory+voting

  StartPage.com, the new favourite, pulls up the unctous Mac Harb in the Parliamentary Review twaddle pushing a party line, but what else do under-worked senators do other than bills like S-22.
  Peter McKenna (UPEI) had a column in the Halifax Chronicle Herald this year about all 3 levels of government bringing in compulsory voting.

  Would it work? Would anyone care?
  And how different are qualificatons for municipal, provincial, federal votes.

• 2 Paul T. // Jul 18, 2012 at 2:05 pm

  Public shaming of those who don’t vote… Wow, certainly would be an interesting idea. Instead of mandatory voting, you’d make people deal with potential employers, friends, lovers knowing if you made the attempt once every 3 years to take part in the public process.

  The only downside I could see is that some people (admittedly a very small minority) don’t vote because they feel the need to protest the system by not taking part. We can digress how much I disagree with them some other time though.

  Definitely an interesting idea though.

• 3 spartikus // Jul 18, 2012 at 4:32 pm

  Just think of how often you’ve scanned the names of the winners of the latest hospital lottery or participants in the Sun Run.

  Which would be never.

• 4 Piker // Jul 18, 2012 at 6:42 pm

  Call me cynical, but you can’t trust a word that comes out of Terry O’Neill’s mouth or pen.

  O’Neill and Reimer are Conservative Party hacks who want this information updated to feed into their party’s vote tracking black box.

  This information is a goldmine for political parties for GOTV purposes. Intuitively, people who go to the polls for municipal elections are much more likely to vote federally. This information will simply be added to the database and allow for even greater microtargetting of known voters. The bonus is that the Conservatives can offload the costs associated with targetting voters to municipalities.

  Who says Conservatives don’t like the (social) sciences?

• 5 Raingurl // Jul 19, 2012 at 10:59 am

  Last time I checked we were flying a Canadian flag……………That’s a complete breach of my privacy. Sounds Communist (or is Socialist, I always get the two mixed up) to me!

• 6 Silly Season // Jul 19, 2012 at 12:52 pm

  Good lord, Piker. You don’t think that doesn’t happen at all levels of government?!

  In fact, I’m betting a case could be made that extreme ‘voter ID’ efforts are already being made at civic governments right here in Metro Van. Even 311 is a data gathering machine.

  The difference, of course, is that political parties do have different agendas that the “regular’ unaffiliated citizen does. On that point, I would agree.

  I would love to think that we could get the voting population more engaged. While the winning party in any election can claim victory with a “majority” of voters, all that chest thumping pales somewhat in my eyes when one considers that the winning side is a ‘majority of a minority’ of all the voters in a jurisdiction (the 31% turnout in the last Vancouver election being an example).

  While it’s easy to say that people are themselves being irresponsible and negligent and “get what they deserve’ by NOT voting, I also believe that governments and our institutions do a lousy job of encouraging people to get to the polls. And why would political parties, who after all, form governement, feel obliged to assist in this, when they count on their own partisans to carry the day? Why encourage a bunch of unafilliated potential voters to exercise their franchise?

  IMHO, we have a terrible record of educating ourselves about the responsibility of WHY we need to exercise our democratic voting rights. I recall no civics courses in grade school or high school–just dreary, rote history lessons that had no applications to pressent day situations.

  Poli sci might wait for post high school, but why are we not teaching the importance of serving or participating in one’s community–and in understanding that voting is part of that? Is the Vancouver Foundation’s recent report on lack of community engagement showing us the folly of this lack of civic education?

  After all, if you gave a damn enough to let the powers that be know what you think is happening to our city, could you posit that you’d give a greater damn about what is happening in your own neighbourhood?

  We do not have a “natural history” of public debate, or “how’ to protest in this country, and I believe we are the poorer for it. The lack of voter turnout is an extension of tyhis throwing in of the democratic towel. Don’t bitch, if you don’t vote, please.

  I would like to see further exploration about how we can engage the population in this most basic, but fundamental part of our demcracy.

• 7 Bill Lee // Jul 19, 2012 at 6:45 pm

  @Raingurl // Jul 19, 2012 at 10:59 am #5

  Urh, uh, I don’t see a country with Red Stars on their flag in the lists of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compulsory_voting

• 8 Bill Lee // Jul 19, 2012 at 6:49 pm

  Hmm. Terry O’Neill
  From the City of Coquitlam website
  http://www.coquitlam.ca/city-hall/mayor-and-council/mayor-and-council/councillor-terry-o-neill.aspx
  [ should be spelled Kwikwetlem. Why don't our school children learn Salish, Halkomelem? ]

  …Terry graduated from SFU with a Bachelor of Arts (English) in 1974 and from Carleton University with a Bachelor of Journalism, Honours, in 1976
  He was a writer, editor and broadcaster for 35 years, holding many senior positions, including: Legislative Correspondent for The Canadian Press, Editor-in-Chief of the Richmond Review; Assignment Editor, CKVU First News; Editor-in-Chief, B.C. Report; host, X-Change, NOW-TV; Senior Writer, The Western Standard, and General Editor, Act of Faith, a bestselling history of the Reform Party of Canada
  Until elected to Council, Terry was a weekly columnist for the Tri-City News and a contributor to the editorial pages of The National Post. He continues to provide communications services to businesses operated by members of his family
  He is a two-time winner of the Canadian Institute of Mining’s Best News Story of the Year award, and was the inaugural winner of the Christian Coalition of B.C.’s Award for Journalistic Integrity
  Terry was elected to Council in 2011 ….

  If you want to go, Coquitlam council meets on Mondays (July 9, 16, 30 Public Hearing), not at all in August then 10 Sept etc.

  He posted his blog dated 18 July 2012
  “. Only 17,961 of 82,839 eligible voters cast ballots in last fall’s election in Coquitlam. That’s a turnout rate of just 21.7% …..We’ll be discussing my motion (seconded by Councillor Linda Reimer) at the month’s end council meeting.”

  CivicVote scraped and pasted his civic platform at :
  https://bc.civicvote.ca/candidate-profile?candidateId=235

• 9 Bill Lee // Jul 19, 2012 at 7:23 pm

  Mark Franklin (see a previous post) found that compulsory voting, (not registration as per O’Neill), only increased voting patterns nationally by 7 to 10 percent, to a total of 90 percent in Oz from before.

  Hill and Louth (2004) on their paper [ Search Hill Louth Compulsory Voting ] on compulsory voting and turnout as viewed in Australia, noted that compulsory enrolment in the period before (states) put in compulsory voting, turnouts were in the 50% range.

  Politics is more engaged in Oz, There is a claim that 88% would vote under voluntary, yet the 1998 Constitional Convention vote [Up the Republic!] was only 45.3% in a voluntary election.

  Lisa Hill and Jonathon Louth also examined voluntary methods of increasing turnout such as rolling registration, voting on weekends or holidays and other methods of lessening “voter fatique.”

  Election salience brings all kinds of questions about dismantling federal and other separation of powers. PR, Proportional Represention is one idea giveing countries greater turnout increases by 3 to 12 percent.

  O’Neill linked (bypassed an Atlantic Monthly article? (“The current issue of Atlantic magazine reports on a Michigan study that found that voter turnout increases if people think the names of people who voted will be publicized.”) on the topic of turn out to get a second-hand?? reference (let me count: Fabula blog to O’Neill blog to Atlantic Monthly to Yale Institution for Social and Political Studies to U Michigan study presented at the U.S. Midwest Political Science Convention, in Chicago April 2006. How many fingers am I holding up?? ) Anyway, Gerber, Grebner, et alia (2006) “Does Voter Turnout Increase When Neighbors’ Voter Turnout Records are publicized?”

  From O’Neill’s link you get the Yale ISPS Get Out the Vote summary of the talk, the paper presented was turned into a 17 page paper in American Political Science Review Vol. 102, No. 1 February 2008 “Social Pressure and Voter Turnout: Evidence from a Large-Scale Field Experiment” readily available on the net from aspanet.org. The mail shot pictures are appended to the article.

  These were mail drops (does anyone get mail, does anyone even read junk mail (deemed Ad Mail by our Charming Canada Post) is The Courier dropped into the blue bag unread?) . Each of the two mailing contained the names of all registered voters on the block with a note describing the purpose of the mailings. Increase voting by maybe 2.4 percent, though a large error in that.

  The Detroit Mayoral Election (don’t roll your eyes like that) had each mailing displayed a list of names of registered voters on the block who voted in the November 2004 presidential election as well as the individuals who voted in the August 2005 mayoral primary. About the same result as the previous mail experiment, with the usual standard statistical errors.

  It is not obvious if the raw data sets are deposited somewhere, but the paper does mention other similar attempts to get-out-the-vote elsewhere.

  Here it is the parties who get out the vote not the government, so the parties who can’t bribe (yet), identify their supporters and offer incentives and cajoling from their boiler rooms to get out the vote. And they certainly don’t want their non-supporters out which may be the great “silent minority” they don’t want to know.

  You and I should vote, and also tell the politicians what they don’t want to hear.

• 10 Silly Season // Jul 19, 2012 at 11:06 pm

  Exactly, @Bill Lee.

• 11 rowbat // Jul 20, 2012 at 9:42 am

  A $25 federal tax credit for voting might help. Just enough to incentivize, but not enough to encourage ‘voting without thinking’?

• 12 Mira // Jul 21, 2012 at 10:41 am

  Answer: Nope!
  I vote because I want to. Also because I usually take the time to get to know (about) the candidates and what they stand for. It’s only fair.
  Unfortunately only a small percentage of voters are doing that, hence the final results… ouch.

• 13 waltyss // Jul 22, 2012 at 3:39 pm

  #12. Hate to tell you Mira but low turnout is not what leads to Vision (I appreciate NPA is your team). It is young people who tend not to vote. The landed westside turns out in droves and they tend to vote NPA. If you had a higher turnout, even fewer of your team would have been elected. Had Vision run more candidates even fewer of your team would have been elected.
  Vision will be defeated in due course. However, absent a radical transformation in what the NPA is about, it will not be by them.
  Nevertheless, it is sad that so few people turn out to vote. I don’t know what the answer is but publishing names either of people who vote or who don’t vote, ends up being a form of public shaming that is unacceptablek, in my view.

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