Thank you.
My affiliation is with the political science department at Carleton. For many years I've worked on studies of voting, with a kind of sideline on participation and non-voting, which in more recent years has taken more prominence than the voting in my own work.
I want to say just a couple of things in introduction here. First of all, on advance polls, we know who votes in advance polls. They're more likely to be older and they're more likely to be people who are determined to vote, who are taking opportunities to get their votes in. So increasing the number of advance polls may have some effect, but the people who are attending them are people who are generally likely to be voting anyway.
The main problem with turnout is, of course, with younger cadres of newly eligible citizens. We have done quite a number of surveys of young people, voters and non-voters, and we do know some things about why young people don't vote. One of those things might be addressed by the changes being proposed in this bill; maybe a couple of others will not.
The kind of thing that young people who don't vote give as a reason, one of the things that really differentiates them from older non-voters is their propensity to say they don't vote because they're too busy. Now, leaving aside the question of whether they're really more busy than the rest of us, the question would be, what does this mean? I think there are really three things it can mean.
First of all, it can mean they perceive themselves to be very busy. I'm not saying young people aren't busy; I know very well many of them are studying. They run one or two jobs at the same time. They can be busy. They perceive themselves to be too busy to take the time to go on election day.
Secondly, though, I think this busyness hides an unwillingness of young people to cast an ill-informed vote, and this I think speaks in some way to their credit. They don't want to vote because they don't really know enough. They haven't studied who the parties are, what they're saying, and so on. So there's a kind of knowledge gap or knowledge lack that is behind this busyness rhetoric.
The third thing is lack of interest. Politics is marginal. They're not very interested in voting.
Of those three things, in providing for more opportunities, the bill might address the first one, that is, people who genuinely perceive themselves to be too busy to go out on a workday, on a weekday, could very well be enticed to go out to vote on this Sunday prior to the election. So I would say that it could have some effect.
The only other thing I wanted to say is that in my reading of the bill, it does strike me that it proposes to set up what I think is a unique election system. I don't know of any other country in the world that would have, in effect, a two-day election period.
So my question is this. Why call this an advance poll? Why not simply bill it as a change to a two-day election period and give publicity? This might entice more people to take it seriously rather than calling an advance poll.
At any rate, I think it's an interesting idea, and it might go some way to increasing turnout.