The Martlet

Students suffer from advanced campus poll rejection

Students who stood in line for hours to vote at a Guelph University’s advanced polling station were shocked when a Conservative party worker burst in and allegedly attempted to take the ballot box.

“The polling station that was set up wasn’t advertised or wasn’t told to all the campaigns and all the candidates and that’s important in our process, that we have scrutineers, you have workers,” said Gary Lunn, the Conservative candidate for Saanich–Gulf Islands.

Lunn, who is running neck-and-neck with federal Green Party leader Elizabeth May in a riding that borders UVic, added that his party is pleased that Elections Canada will accept all of the ballots.

“We felt very strongly that the students shouldn’t be punished,” he said. “That’s only going to disenfranchise the youth vote.”

Yet it was the Conservative Party’s lawyer that demanded Elections Canada reject those students’ ballots. John Enright, a spokesperson for Elections Canada, maintains that the votes will count because they were cast in a way that respects the Canada Elections Act. However, in the wake of the incident they’ve decided not to allow any more impromptu campus voting for the rest of the election.

“If a returning officer wants to conduct a registration voting activity on campus they need to consult with Elections Canada before the election is called,” said Enright. “The returning officers know their electoral districts better than anybody else . . . It’s for them to determine the need and to propose the activity. In the case of Guelph it wasn’t done at all and in the case of others, no returning officers have pre-planned similar activities for this election.”

According to UVic political science professor Matt James, there’s more to it than that.

“I think there’s a possibility that Elections Canada is loath to get into another high-profile controversy with the Conservatives given the ongoing court battles between the two entities over the so-called “in and out” scheme in which the Conservatives were allegedly involved during the [2006] election,” said James.

“I think students are getting the message that some people don’t want them to vote, which, at least for some, will of course provide a very powerful motivation to vote.”

Edith Loring-Kuhanga, the NDP candidate for Saanich–Gulf Islands, did not respond to repeated interview requests. However, the Liberal candidate, Renée Hetherington, said that today’s young people are more knowledgeable and aware of issues than any generation before them.

“This is a strength we must harness,” she said in an email response. “If the Conservatives have their way, these voices will not be represented . . . By simply showing up to vote on May 2, Canada’s youth will send a strong message to the Harper Conservatives that their voice matters.”

May heard those voices when she attended a rally on campus at the University of Guelph before the controversial ballot.

“Everyone was very excited about it in a very non-partisan sense. Students were gathering to say ‘We’ve got to vote. We’ve got to get out the vote. We’ve got to participate’,” said May. “It was well-covered in the media in advance, so I thought the interference by Conservative party workers during the vote and the attempt to take the ballot box was really shocking.”

May suggests that Prime Minister Stephen Harper hopes to suppress youth voter turnout by setting May 2 as the election date, demanding the shortest legal election length possible and ejecting youth from his campaign rallies.

“I think that’s extremely anti-democratic and dangerous for the health of our democracy,” said May, adding that Harper’s new Elections Canada law has resulted in thousands of students, homeless people and seniors who have given up their driver’s licences being denied the right to vote. “The new requirements speak to a solution to the problem of . . . Canadians trying to vote more than once, but the obvious reality is that many Canadians are voting less than once and we have no problem of wide-spread voter fraud. Our crisis is of low voter turnout. We should be examining the benefit of a slightly longer election period . . . more leaders debates, more democratic leaders debates [and] greater access to candidates for students to help engage young people . . . A lot of young people have said that they’d vote if they could vote on the Internet. So why not? But we need to make sure we have a clear record and that it’s not susceptible to software programming to favour one candidate over another.”

May also said that while her party is committed to reaching out to youth via traditional methods and social media, the Guelph incident must serve as a lesson for the next election.

“I was thinking it’s a shame they’re not doing this on campuses across the country,” said May. “Now that it’s all unravelled and Elections Canada has said . . . ‘We wouldn’t want any other returning officers to try something like this,’ it really puts into sharp relief the question of what efforts are made to get students to vote . . . If it looks like we’re going to have an election at a time when students will find it very difficult to vote, we should plan ahead for such special ballots.”

For Dylan Sherlock, a UVic Students’ Society (UVSS) director-at-large who helped organize the UVic Vote Mob, that’s a good plan.

“I’d like to see . . . an advance polling station on every single campus . . . because for students there are the most barriers to actually getting to vote,” said Sherlock. “So the move that the returning officer made at Guelph is in my mind heroic because it was trying to completely reverse the situation for students.”