Majority of York Region voters elect to stay home

Yorkregion.com
Oct. 30, 2014
By Laura Finney

The majority of eligible residents in York Region did not vote in Monday’s municipal election.

Turnout rates varied from about 30 to just more than 40 per cent, depending on the municipality.

This is normal, said Dennis Pilon, Associate Professor Political Science at York University, but admitted the numbers are disappointing.

“Voting is not like a market, it’s not a consumer item. If I don’t go to Walmart, I hurt Walmart. If I don’t vote, I hurt myself,” he said. “If people pass up the opportunity to try to influence the process, they are pretty much allowing those who already have superior privilege in our society to just have even more control of power.”

But he is not in a hurry to blame the individual voter or apathy.

“I think voter apathy is a lousy explanation for what is going on,” he explained. “The story is much more complicated and I think we need to be a bit more sympathetic to the challenges that voters face.”

Some people do not vote because they are uninformed, they do not know what is at stake or they do not feel they are entitled to vote, he said.

The lack of political parties in municipal elections also makes voting for candidates more difficult.

“At the provincial or federal level, it is not like people are really well informed on issues there either,” he explained.

“But they tend to use political parties as a kind of proxy for information.”

Renan Levine, lecturer with the department of political science at the University of Toronto agreed.

With a partisan system, he said “turnout would increase.”

Conflict also increases voter attendance.

Case in point? Toronto had a record-breaking 60-per-cent turnout. One of the reasons was conflict. Voters felt strongly for or against Ford Nation, Pilon said.

In 2010, Vaughan had a voter turnout of 40.5 per cent, which dropped to 30.8 per cent this election. That is because four years ago, Vaughan had a high-profile competitive race and,this year, they did not, explained Levine.

There are other factors that bring people to the polls.

Income, age and immigration status are likely to influence voting, Pilon said.

Residents with higher incomes and older residents are more likely to vote. And there are also residents who will vote because they feel a strong civic duty.

“They’d have to have Ebola for them not to go vote,” said Levine.

Recent immigrants or residents new to the community are less likely to vote.

While Levine said low voter turnout is not a good thing, having a good turnout is not the end goal of democracy.

There are countries with high voter turnout that are not necessarily democratic.

What is important, he said, is having a mechanism to change who is in power.

“The critical thing is that we have free, fair and potentially competitive elections. It’s not a democracy if your elections are not free, fair and potentially competitive.”

He did have some suggestions for increasing turnout, such as making polls more accessible, making election day a holiday so people who work can vote, adding partisan labels and even charging people who do not vote.

Pilon noted that voter turnout increases when candidates spend more campaign time making personal contact, like going door to door, with constituents.