Reversing the Trend in Voter Turnout

By Jeremy Wright

If you find yourself craving a box of Timbits, there are five ways you can get it:  You can walk into a Tim’s and line up at the counter, you can use their touch-screen system, you can order on your phone, use the drive through or just order with Uber Eats.  Tim’s makes it as easy as possible, to make sure they sell as many Timbits as possible.

Why don’t we do the same for voting?  If we want to maximise the number of people who participate in elections, shouldn’t we also make it as easy as possible by offering different ways to vote? We all know that voter turnout, across Canada, is in a downward spiral. This post explores one potential remedy: access to voting methods.

Federally and provincially, there is literally only one way to vote: A paper ballot, placed into a box.  In 2024, this seems a little out of date!  Municipally, on the other hand, many cities and towns have been experimenting with the inclusion of online voting, phone voting, and mail-in ballots.  We decided to do some data analysis and see how our Tim Bit Theory plays out in the political context of Ontario municipal elections. To do that, we’re looking to see if the number of voting methods (In-person, Internet, Phone, Mail) that voters have access to is associated with differences in voter turnout.

So far, we’ve already found evidence that access to multiple voting methods was associated with significantly higher voter turnout! More specifically, in the 2014 and 2018 Ontario municipal elections, municipalities that used 2 or more voting methods had an average voter turnout that was 5-7% higher than municipalities who only had a single option for how to cast a ballot.

In the 2022 municipal election there were no significant differences, but when all three election cycles were combined then the trend still holds where municipalities with 2 or more voting methods had significantly higher voter turnout.

This is exciting news because as we find more information about the characteristics of elections with higher turnout, we will be able to make evidence-based suggestions to policy makers about improvements that we can make to the democratic institutions Canadians rely on.

This work is part of a larger voter turnout project we’re working on. Over the last several decades there has been a disturbing trend in Canadian politics: A major decline in voter turnout. At Unlock Democracy Canada we are trying to Reverse the Trend. Our goal is to identify things that bring people to the polls so we are better able to inform the ways in which we should improve Canadian democracy. We’re specifically looking at two factors that we believe have an influence on voter turnout in Canada: 1) Access to different voting methods (Tim Bit Theory), and 2) the decline of direct democracy by way of fewer referendums.

Referendums used to be much more common in Canada, especially at the local level, but have since become almost non-existent:

We are currently reviewing data to check whether the presence of referendum questions impacts voter turnout in municipal elections. Our expectations are that the presence of referendums, as well as access to multiple voting methods, will motivate more people to head to the polls.  As we continue to collect more information and ask more questions, we will be able to provide more accurate and helpful advice.

Stay tuned as we will be posting updates to keep you informed about what we find so that we can help improve Canadian democracy by Reversing the Trend!