Even as cities in British Columbia saw a radical change In terms of who runs their councils, one thing remained the same as in the last municipal election: turnout continued to lag far behind provincial and federal votes.
As of 3:00 PM PT Sunday, preliminary results showed just over 37 percent of voters had turned out to elect local representatives.
It is a number that is a few percentage points lower than four years ago, however continues to reflect a trend this is true across Canada.
So why don’t people vote in local elections? And how did essentially the same level of political participation translate into markedly different town halls on Saturday?
“For the more casual voter, who might run in a provincial or certainly federal election, the municipal level is seen as a utility,” said David Black, who teaches political communication at Royal Roads University in Victoria.
“It’s this lack of appreciation for the difference that a mayor and a council can make in your life, which I think is a starting point for low participation.”
In addition to the lack of understanding about what do municipalities dosay the experts a huge list of candidates and an at-large voting system remain barriers to greater participation across the province.
“ABC voters are clearly very excited results in VancouverStewart Prest, a political scientist at Quest University in Squamish, B.C., said of the new center-right party that won all of its seats in Vancouver.
“But the rest of the population, and there’s a significant portion of the population that didn’t vote for ABC, they have very little left to show for their votes.”
Both Black and Prest say there are structural fixes that need to happen to ensure greater voter turnout in the upcoming municipal elections.
386,931 eligible voters did not vote for Ken Sim.
—@seanorr
Why have so many mayors been overthrown?
While many BC mayors lost their jobs, many councilors kept theirs, in something known as the “incumbent effect,” where voters tend to trust tried and tested incumbents.
While voter turnout remained largely the same across the province this year, the reason incumbent mayors in particular seemed be swept away wholesale it has to do with how they become spearheads for particular issues, according to Black.
In Vancouver, Kennedy Stewart became a symbol of the city’s failure to address a perceived increase in crime and homelessness, according to Black. Colin Basran of Kelowna seemed to fall in this same sword, losing to Tom Dyas.
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Many cities in British Columbia have new mayors after municipal elections that saw the loss of several incumbents, including Vancouver and Surrey, where crime and policing issues played a big role in the election campaign.
“Candidates for mayor are much more easily identified as being on one side or the other of a question that becomes the ‘ballot question,'” he said.Surrey RCMP versus a Surrey police force [for instance]. In the South Island, development and development policy, this became the election issue.
“According to the voters on this issue, the incumbent becomes uniquely vulnerable and the incumbency effect dissolves.”
Prest says a perceived lack of action on these “ballot issues” may have led to the same well-informed and affluent voters who voted incumbent mayors into power in 2018 to vote them out in 2022.
Black identifies one community that saw an “election wave,” where one candidate boosted a voting base and increased turnout: Langford, B.C., on Vancouver Island, which saw longtime Mayor Stew Young. decisively defeated by Scott Goodmanson.
What are the solutions to low participation?
Black says municipal governments now have a responsibility to educate voters about their responsibilities and powers, and convince them of their importance, even outside of an election cycle.
Although more municipal voters used advance polls and mail-in opportunities in this election, turnout numbers remained largely the same.
Prest says this shows the limit of “small scale” solutions to ensure people turn out to vote and says deeper institutional solutions are needed.
“When people are represented in the systems, we have good evidence that participation will increase,” he said.
Prest says that one such solution would be to increase the threshold for the registration of candidates, thus reducing the length of the ballots.
Another solution would be to introduce proportional voting systems, such as single transferable votewhich would lead people to identify with the candidates more easily, according to Prest.
Prest says voters should resist technological solutions like online voting, which have been proven be unreliable and unreliable in the past, and focus on calling for institutional reform.
“Politics really can’t be fixed by technology,” he said. “It’s fixed by fixing institutions … by bringing people into the conversation.”