41% of registered voters in Canada didn’t choose to exercise their right to vote in the recent federal election. I was one of them. Neither did any of my family members of voting age went to the booth to cast their vote. Apart from some pressing personal problems that we had to deal with in our family, it was also a plain indifference that made us stay at home.  

While I didn’t have any interest in Canadian politics, I was curious to find out why there was a poor voter turnout in the recent election and why there were so many like me who displayed such apathy.

I found two articles that gave quite convincing answers:

1. What if they gave an election and nobody won? By ANDREW COYNE in the Macleans magazine.
2. Parties stick with obsolete strategies by Michael Geist in the Toronto Star.

While Andrew Coyne explains in clear detail what is ailing our (Canadian) electoral system, he says little about what is the cure that can be applied, given the constraints that he mentioned in the article.

For instance it is understandable that when he says that we have five parties competing to form a majority government, and it is highly unlikely that such a majority government will be formed.

While I am not competent to answer many of his questions in the last paragraph of his article, there was one question (Why do so many people no longer bother to vote?) that interested me.

I could find some answer for it in the second article by Michael Geist. It was spot-on to suggest that our parties failed to capitalize on what the Internet can offer with its Web 2.0 technologies.

As the article puts it correctly that no party in Canada realized that the Internet is no longer just a broadcast medium, but also a communication and participation tool.

So it would have been prudent upon the parties to encourage and build up a strong Internet community debating several issues confronting the government, the country (not just electoral issues and not just partisan blogs favoring its own policies) to make it known where each party stands. And that should have begun long before the elections were announced.

This to some extent counteracted the strategy of Steven Harper to declare an election at short notice and quietly win it before anybody took notice. That also would have helped change some of the undecided voters and draw in some of the uninvolved voters (like me).


Contrast our electoral processes with that of our neighbors down south where potential voters actively participate using the Internet and make it known whom they favor long before the elections are called out. They not only contribute monetarily to the campaigns of political candidates online, but also upload their own videos of what they find interesting/important about the candidates and their policies and write blogs to share their views with others in the community.

It is reasonable to expect that such potential voters who so enthusiastically participate will definitely take the initiative to vote.