Declining your ballot: Not in the next federal election
The federal government has no interests in changing the federal elections law in the near future to allow voters a chance to register a declined vote, a form of protest vote that hit record numbers during the recent Ontario election.
Voting
The federal government has no plans to change its elections law so that voters can register a declined vote, even though that form of protest hit record levels in Ontario’s recent election.
The Conservative government made sweeping changes to the federal election law this year through the Fair Elections Act, including detailed rules around voter identification at polling stations. However, the office of Democratic Reform Minister Pierre Poilievre said this week that the government “has no plans to amend the Canada Elections Act to track declined ballots.”
More than 31,000 Ontarians declined their ballot in the June 12 election, the highest number to do so since 1975 and a dramatic increase over levels in the last election.
The next federal election is expected by the fall of 2015.
Formally declining to vote is different from spoiling a ballot (or not showing up at all): the voter must publicly declare his or her refusal to vote at the polling station itself. Provincially, the right is available in Ontario, Manitoba and Alberta. Voters who formally decline their ballots do so for a variety of reasons, such as a conviction that none of the candidates on the ballot represents their beliefs, coupled with a desire to ensure elected officials know this.
Federally, Elections Canada simply lumps those ballots into the “rejected” ballot category. That is a much broader category that includes ballots left blank, marked for more than one candidate, defaced or not marked properly. There is no way of knowing what the voter’s intent was in failing to mark the ballot properly for one candidate.
“It should be on the ballot as ‘none of the above’ on the bottom with a couple of lines to give a reason,” said Duff Conacher, co-founder of Democracy Watch.
More than 25 years ago, the federal elections agency unsuccessfully pushed for the right to register a protest vote. Two private members’ bills to enshrine the declined ballot in federal elections law — including one that would have allowed Canadians to write in why they were declining to vote — also failed to capture the necessary endorsements.
“It clearly is a mechanism for combining a message of being an engaged citizen (willing to come out to vote) while also saying no candidate, and/or their party, has the citizen’s support in a particular election,” said NDP democratic reform critic Craig Scott.
“It is well worth including it on the list of electoral reforms — including reversing the negative effects of this government’s ‘unfair elections act’ — any government will need to consider after the 2015 election.”
That list of needed reforms is long, said Green Party Leader Elizabeth May, but declined ballots isn’t a priority for her. Topping her list is proportional representation, which would distribute seats in the House of Commons based more closely on parties’ overall vote counts.
May said the declined ballot should officially be offered to all voters, and that it might be possible to make it a confidential ballot, but this would be a more pressing need if accompanied by mandatory voting.
“It should be an opportunity,” she said. “Anything that gives voters the chance to participate in the electoral process and feel empowered by it is an important step.”
Liberal democratic reform critic Scott Simms said the idea of declined ballots sounds good in principle, but he questioned how it might work federally.
“It’s one thing to do it, but then you have address the question (of) what do we do now if the majority decline?” said Simms.
jpress@ottawacitizen.com
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