It’s called Get Out the Vote (GOV). All political parties do the best they can at it. We beg people to get involved in it. It is the most critical part of campaigning. And we are doing worse at it today than 64 years ago.
I voted in my first federal election in 1958. The turnout across Canada in that election was 79.4 per cent of eligible voters. In the recent provincial election in Ontario the turnout was just 43 per cent. I would say that our GOV is slipping.
There are, of course, different types of GOV efforts. They can be municipal, provincial and federal and they can also be within organizations such as a political party. The rest of this article is about the current federal conservative leadership, in which voting is already underway.
It would appear that the conservatives have sent out 678,708 ballots to people holding conservative party memberships in time to be eligible to vote. It should be noted that there were only about 250,000 paid-up conservative party of Canada members when the leadership opened up to receive what I call temporary memberships. Based on past experience, they will be lucky to see 450,000 of those ballots come back.
I would say the biggest problem is for Pierre Poilievre’s team who have over 300,000 of these temporary members to corral and make sure they fill in their ballot and it gets in the mail back to the party. They will have few problems in Alberta where Poilievre is strong. I hear they are having ‘fill in your ballot’ parties. They do that because many voters lack access to a photocopier. Voters have to include photographic confirmation of their identity to go with their ballot. The process is not very secret.
Where the surprise comes is in the allocation of votes to electoral districts. If you are in a riding where there are 500 members voting, your vote has twice the value of a vote in a riding with 1000 members voting. Conservatives think ridings are equal, not voters.
To further complicate the voting, conservatives use preferential voting. All voters can number their votes and if their first choice does not win and has the lowest vote, their next choice moves up in the subsequent count. What it means is that if the voting goes, in this case, up to three counts, it will be the people voting for losers who will ultimately pick the winner. And that explains all the leadership contests for the conservative party of Canada.
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Copyright 2022 © Peter Lowry
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