Voter turnout in recent elections has been, in a word, pitiful. The last provincial election in 2009 saw a record low of just 50 per cent of eligible voters cast a ballot, while the municipal elections held throughout B.C. last November were even worse, with less than 30 per cent bothering to vote.
Given polling stations are located right in the neighbourhood, and marking a ballot takes all of a minute or two, it's not that onerous a task to vote, but the trend, at all levels of government in Canada, is for fewer and fewer people to do so.
Although it's a sad commentary on today's society, I have to give the B.C. Liberal government marks for at least trying to do something about the situation.
Earlier this month the province asked the chief electoral officer to convene an independent panel to examine the potential for using Internet voting in both provincial and municipal elections.
Essentially what we're saying to people is that if you're too lazy, or somehow can't find 15 minutes to spare over a 12hour period on election day, we'll make it easier on you. If walking down the block or around the corner is simply more than you can handle, we'll bring the polling booth to your desktop or your mobile device.
Should online voting make its way to B.C., I suspect it will drive numbers higher like it did recently in Ontario, where 34 communities that used it saw voter turnout increase anywhere from four to 20 per cent.
So for those where access is indeed the hurdle, Internet voting will be a saviour, but what about those whose reason for not showing up to perform their civic duty is less about convenience and more about contempt?
The steady decline in turnout over the years is not all due to busy schedules or wanting to stay home to catch the hockey playoffs on TV.
Many don't vote because they're turned off by the unseemly nature of politics and find the whole process pointless because nothing changes regardless of who gets elected.
If that's the case, and I'd have to say it's the leading cause of absenteeism at the polls these days, then I'm not so sure online voting is going to do the trick. I don't think there's any doubt that making the practice of casting a ballot more convenient will, at least to some extent, help reverse a troubling trend, but it's far from a panacea for the bigger and more complex issue of low voter turnout.
Politicians are going to have to look a lot deeper to find those answers.
