I do, and if I may, I would like to share my time with Madam Dobrzynska, because we've jointly prepared a statement.
I do thank you very much and I thank the members of this committee very much for the opportunity to come and talk about the report that we drafted for Elections Canada entitled Potential Impacts of Extended Advance Voting on Voter Turnout. We certainly want to answer whatever questions we have as clearly and as comprehensively as we can. We thank you very much for the opportunity to speak about this and for your interest in electoral participation.
We do regret that Professor Blais can't be with us here today. He's out of the country, but as we prepared this report together, he has prepared these remarks with us.
In the short time we have here we want to provide you with answers to the questions that we think are most prominent in our report and that perhaps are weighing most heavily for you on this legislation. First, what's the cross-national evidence on the effects of increasing convenience for voting on turnout? Secondly, what evidence do we have in Canadian federal elections about the relationship between increased advanced voting and overall turnout? Finally, who is it that votes in advance?
We think that by answering these questions we can better understand what the short-term and the long-term effects of greater advance voting on overall turnout will be.