Also, what do you think of compulsory voting, similar to the system in Australia?

Somehow my initial post got lost. Calgary Center's Conservative win was accomplished with 29.4% of eligible voter turnout. How do we convince people to get off their collective butts and vote?
do you think proportional representation is a viable idea?

I worry we always end up with "majorities" that represent such a small portion of voters.

Well yesterday was Cyber Monday...

I'm not sure about forcing people to vote, I'd rather have people who are informed and care voting.  Also, why increase the money spent only to have a bunch of people spoil ballots?

I do think we need to do more to allow people to vote.  Calgary abolished voting via mail a while ago, I'm not sure if they reinstated it.  It prevented me from voting in one election, right after I moved but I was still going back and forth.  Here, there was recently a poll to vote for a gummy bear to test an online system, that might help if they get it reasonably secure.

People need to be given the opportunity to vote.  I've had 14 hour days on election days.  Students aren't excused from labs, exams, and participation type classes so they may vote.  Missing typical classes can be detrimental.  Advance polls are often out of the way, there is very minimal parking, transit involves taking multiple buses in an area not typically travelled and lines are long.  Taking 3+ hours to vote isn't always practical for people.  People at the polling stations aren't familar with voting rules.  Bringing the required pieces of ID and being told you can't vote that day probably deters some people.  I was surprised when it was recorded which subsets I voted on or not, that may deter some people.

Robocalls aren't the only thing that become confusing to people.  I've recieved mail about a candidate in another riding, and not the candidate in my riding.  I didn't recieve much other information ahead of time in the mail.  I was questioning whether or not the riding boundaries had changed without publicity, but it was just poor campaigning choices.  That could confuse people, who are no longer confident they even know who they are voting for.

I think changes need to be made and tested way before we consider implementing mandatory voting.

Do you think having more convenient polling stations would help? It seems to me if there was the option to vote @ the student life centre or @ the mall would make voting easier?
Agree mail-in should be reinstated (for rural, elderly, not computer literate voters, or for any other reason)

I think being able to vote on campus regardless of the riding would make a huge difference when it comes to student votes, especially for commuter-campuses, as U of C is.

NInja said "we always end up with "majorities" that represent such a small portion of voters". That's the real issue.  Our system of voting is a fraud, so participating in it only legitmizes it, i.e. accept it the way it is. I say it's a fraud because the media refer to Harper's "majority" goverment. Yet he barely has the support of a third of the population to make his majority. So in what mathematical system does less than 40% constitute a majority? 

Mandatory voting? Morally I see this as wrong as it forces one to participate in an unfair system.

Would proportional representation help? Sure. But politicians will be against it because they would no longer stand to gain a majority based on a fluke result in a few ridings. And the result would mean that politicians would have to compromise because no one party would have a majority. And we all know how much politicians like compromising  . Big media outlets are also not likely to support such a move as they have a vested interest in portraying elections as just another sports game - i.e., it's all about who "wins".  But elections shouldn't be about winning and losing - they should be about choosing the people who will represent us in making important decisions. And to be legitimate, that needs to reflect as many stakeholders as possible. 

The only outside possibility I see with PR is to apply it to some body (namely, the Senate) that no one currently cares about and would have a very limited role (eg. currently the Senate cannot vote down money bills, so it can't deny funds to the government), but would at least offer some degree of checks and balances at the federal level. (and offer the opportunity of a more proportionate inclusion of women and minorities and regional representation - just how much say do Quebec citizens have in Harper's cabinet). But again politicians won't go for that either because they'd prefer a dictatorship to having to share power (more efficient, don't you know - at least the trains run on time).

Hi ninjafaery,

I think the reason for low voter turn-out is connected to supply and demand.

For the most part political parties offer only more bitter invective against their rivals and more of the same corruption that they have railed against.

Is it any wonder that nobody is lining up for that kind of deal.

It would be like me standing at the roadside with a truckload of pig manure and telling you that if you let me I'll dump it all over you and your family and then wondering why you don't take me up on my incredibly generous offer.

The Politician response to the same issue is fabulously funny.

Pay Politicians more.  Because if we offered our Politicians better wages we'd get better politicians.

The fly in that ointment is that our politicians have the opportunity to raise their own salaries without needing to demonstrate any meritorious reason for doing so.

Today's politician makes $X.  Is today's politician better tomorrow when we start paying them $X + 10%?  No.  The general public's stupidity factor may have grown a smidge but we can expect the same calibre of politician.

Build a better mousetrap and the world will beat a path to your door.  It probably is true about politicians too.

Grace and peace to you you.

John

Majority government, in our system, does not refer to popular vote. It refers to seats in the House. Harper's government is legitimately a majority government under our current system. The problem is not with the use of the term, the problem is that you can get a majority of the seats in the house without having a majority of the popular vote.

As long as we keep a first-past-the-post system, this problem is with us. A proportional system, even a mixed member one, fixes it but introduces other problems (e.g. with more than two parties, as we have right now, majorities become rare and you're subject to endless coaltions in which rump parties may end up having more say than they really should). We have to decide which set of problems we want. Does proportional improve turnout? Not sure. How is voter turnout in Italy?

Yes, I agree that first-past-the-post is part of problem, but the Rob Ford affair illustrates another. How do you get people to take politics and political action seriously when even the politicians don't?

Mendalla

My daughter tried to vote but, because she moved a little over a year ago, she needed to register 3 or 4 days before the election and had not done so.  The riding in Calgary includes a large number of apartments and condos with a high proportion of singles and young couples.  Over the top criticism of outside Liberalls (McGuinty and Trudeau) in our media probably also discouraged people from voting.  While I only voted Liberal once in my life (in Halfax), and would probably not have voted Liberal if I lived in the riding (live about 6 blocks away), I believe our media were a major factor in the eelction of the 4th best candidate.

In our last federal election, a bit over 20% of elegible voters voted for Conservative Party candidates.  In this by-election 11% of eligible voters chose our MP.

Yes, what indeed is the problem(s) (if any) with low voter turnout?  People still get elected...

In 2008 voter turnout in Itay was over 80%, although - interestingly - that was the LOWEST voter turnout in Italy since World War II.

It seems to me that another problem with proportional representation is that too many decisions get made behind the scenes in political horse trading. So, the voters elect a Parliament, and then all the leaders get together behind closed doors and engage in deal-making in order to put together coalitions (because of the never ending minority situation) and, really, the voters have no idea what deals or promises have been made (which also means that, really, when you vote you're not entirely sure what you're voting for.) At least with FPTP if I vote Conservative I have a general idea of what the Conservative Party wants to do so I know what I'm voting for (or NDP or Liberal) and I can hold them accountable for not doing what they promised. And you're right about smaller parties. Frankly, I'm not sure that it's really any less democratic for the Conservatives to win a majority with 38% than it would be for the third party (with maybe 20-25% or less) to perpetually be in the drivers seat because their support is crucial to forming a government.

And, of course, it's an extreme example, but one example of where proportional representation got it very, very wrong to say the least was Weimar Germany where a guy named Hitler was able to cobble together what looked like a weak coalition government when it took office.

Even keeping with a FPTP system, I think it would be interesting if we could vote for the PM directly, as well as our MP, with the possibility of voting for 2 different parties. I think quite a few bad MPs get voted in simply because people are actually voting for the leader.

I have no idea what would happen if you had a leader from one party though, and a majority of MPs from a different party!

There's quite a loss of faith in politicians that you can watch developing for some decades. It's aggravated by news media that spread ignorance and propaganda - notably the privately-owned ones. Radio news on private radio is usually scandalously incompetent, and with news rooms far too small, anyway. Newspapers have, most of them, been propaganda instruments since the emergence of the popular press about a hundred and twenty years ago.

Ignorance, distrust, popularized bigotry - all are what have democracy fading.

Victoria had over 40% turnout for their federal by election.

I think attack ads have a lot to do with low turn-out. 

Keep telling the people how terrible, incompetent, dishonest, corrupt, unChristian, the opponent is; have them return the same - and no wonder Joe Blow decides that all politicians are crooks and washes his hands of the whole mess.   Which usually seems to be to the advantage of the party in power.  They maintain the status quo.

What we need in my opinion is for politicians up for office to tell the people plainly what they intend to do if they are elected, and show how they plan to achieve it. 

Convince people to vote for you - they come out and vote

Convince people not to vote for someone - they won't bother voting

I wish there were some way to limit attack ads.  They just turn me off the whole process.

(Yes, I vote.  But I would love to be able to vote for someone, rather than against the other.)

I think you hit the nail on the head, seeler. Far more than first past the post, the reality is that our praties now spend most of their time not trying to convince anyone to vote for them but trying to convince people who don't support them to simply not vote at all. There's no attempt to grow the base anymore. The point is to try to find a way to make the base work to your advantage. Thus, the Conservatives are quite happy with 35-38% of the vote, as long as they can keep supporters of the Liberals and NDP at home on election day.

Agreed. Seeler is dead on.

Lower turn-outs for by-elections are not uncommon - there's simply less media coverage, for one thing, and there's less propoganda put out by the parties. I was one of the lucky ones who did get to vote the other day and I always find it interesting to see who is there. At my polling station, while I was there, it was mostly older people (then again, I do live in  neighbourhood with a high number of retirees). 

Like Seeler said, I think we would get a better turn out if, instead of spending so much time knocking other candidates/parties down, the candidates would focus on their own platforms. I want to know what the candidate is going to do once he or she gets to Ottawa. 

Like others have said, I also would like to see electoral reform so that we can get rid of this first past the post system. I'm not sure what the best system would look like, but there's got to be plenty of ideas that are better than what we've got now.

In any election I've worked on, it's the older people who turn out. They'll wheelchair it five blocks in a blizzard if they have to. younger people won't.

I agree that we have been terribly damaged by negative campaigns. And by politicians who continue their negativity in all dealing even after the election. It's very hard to find a party to believe in and trust.

And this is a phenomenon which has been getting measurably worse in both Canada and the US.

I've never experienced an election in a blizzard, but I can totally picture that! I have worked on election days in the past and am always intrigued by who shows up. At least twice I've worked at polling stations near the university - and those stations always seem to get a fair number of young people showing up.