Ms. Jennings, you asked whether there is any evidence showing that if elections were held at fixed dates, the voter turnout rate would increase. There is no evidence of that.
Yesterday, I called a colleague and good friend -- they are not mutually exclusive -- who shall remain nameless, since I don't want to bring him into this publicly. He is someone who has thoroughly studied voter turnout rates across the globe, and he has also taken part in comparative studies. When I told him some people thought that holding elections at fixed dates would improve the voter turnout rate, he burst out laughing.
If I had told my American colleagues at the American University that Canadians had found a way to deal with the drop in voter turnout that involved holding elections on fixed dates, imagine what their reaction would have been! They would have said: “We tried that 200 years ago!”