Comedian Samantha Bee has posted a series of unique instructional videos about how to vote in the extremely agitated U.S. mid-term elections.
It’s a variety of soothing montages — cute dog videos, adorable kittens, scenic vistas, yummy desserts — with a gentle voice-over on the basics of how to cast a ballot.
In “Soothing Slow Motion Dogs Voter Guide,” one of the tips she croons — as a golden Lab catches a pizza slice — is about absentee ballots. “Special tip to millennials: You may need a ‘stamp’ to mail in your ballot, so ask your parents, or a trusted barista, where the post office is.”
My colleague Vaughn Palmer and I spent 60 seconds this week sketching out a similar routine about the proportional-representation referendum, based on advising young people on how to deal with archaic communication technology, such as envelopes and postal boxes.
“And after you’ve put it all in the big envelope you lick the flap.”
“Say what?”
“You lick the flap. With your tongue.”
“That is so gross.”
(The bit is still in the development stage, if Palmer can work the fax machine.)
Yes, it’s patronizing. Yes, some 20-somethings have launched a big push to engage people on making every vote count. But the turnout is one of dozens of big questions about the referendum. They’re all coming to the fore after week two of the official campaign that will run through to the close of voting on Nov. 30.
There’s one visual that keeps cropping up in social media related to turnout. It’s recycling boxes in apartment blocks stuffed with discarded ballots that eligible voters can’t be bothered to open, let alone cast. There are security steps to curb their misuse.
But the fact they’re discarded stands by itself. There’s no question that each one subtracts from the validity of the results. The only issue is: How much?
For all the speculation about turnout, the only facts to go on come from the track record of referendums. The last one in 2011 is comparable. The referendum on the harmonized sales tax was about an issue that had similar universal application in B.C. (merging provincial and federal sales taxes). It had a high public profile, since it arose from a successful petition campaign.
Elections B.C. mailed out 3.1 million ballots and got back 1.6 million (54 per cent).
The percentage of registered voters who voted was 53 per cent. The estimated turnout by eligible voters was 49 per cent.
If turnout for this vote is in the same range and if it is a relatively close vote, 25 to 30 per cent of B.C. could change the electoral system and an even smaller fraction would determine the option, if the voters choose proportional representation.
Determining the validity depends mostly on your outlook about the questions. But the lack of any regional thresholds for approval — given how varied the impacts will be between urban and rural ridings — looks like a distinct drawback.
The Opposition spent part of this week fixating on some of the many other questions still hanging.
Attorney General David Eby’s report lists more than two dozen questions that have to be determined after the vote, if change is approved.
Other than how many MLAs there will be, most are narrow and technical. But the fact they will be decided in a committee dominated by government — as with most everything else in this process — is a point of attack for the Liberals.
The forum for that attack is also telling. It was during debate on a bill allowing for a second referendum after two elections, if a new process is picked.
And as if that’s not enough electoral arguments, a bill restricting the recall mechanism against MLAs was tabled by Eby, who might be the target of a recall campaign shortly, over the speculation tax.
This week’s wild card was former NDP premier Glen Clark, now CEO of Jim Pattison Group, who volunteered that he’s against proportional representation and voted no.
That represents a full turn of the wheel. He won the 1996 election with 2.5 percentage points fewer votes than the B.C. Liberals. That result prompted the Liberals, when they won, to start electoral-reform talk than has continued, off and on, to this day.
