Canadians will be voting on October 19, 2015. It is important to note that Stephen Harper and his conservatives do not want you to vote. They know that a high turnout, specially one consisting of young people, women and those with an ethnic background are bad for their chances to be re-elected.
Their best chance to win is to make it very hard for you to vote and they will try to turn you away on voting day. They have changed Canada's voter ID rules to more closely match those in the USA.
The biggest change and the one most likely to block you from casting your ballot is that the new law states that your Voter ID Card that you will receive in the mail can no longer be used as ID! Amazing! Your firearms license is acceptable but your Voter ID Card is not! Like I say, Harper wants Canada to be just like the USA.
If you have a Government issued ID with your photo and current address on it, you can use that. A Drivers Licence or Provincial or Territorial ID will work as long as it has your photo and address. If you do not have one of these, then you can choose from a list of acceptable forms of ID they offer on their website. Please note, a Passport will not be accepted by itself, it must be accompanied by other ID from the list.
PLEASE click on the link below and check out the new rules. Elections Canada will be of no help as they are now prevented by law from encouraging you to vote or to offer any guides to make voting easier. Another one of Harper's new laws. Read it, start collecting the required ID and PLEASE VOTE on October 19!
Here is the list
If you do not want to click on the link, here is the address. Copy and paste into your browser
http://www.elections.ca/content2.aspx?section=id&document=index&lang=e
From looking at those rules, it looks to me like it's still very easy for anybody who wants to vote to do just that. I see nothing wrong with those rules at all.
ReplyDeleteIf you are a student living away from home your ID may not have the address of your dormitory on it. If you are not getting a utility bill you may not have that crucial second piece of ID. If you are elderly and no longer have a drivers licence you will have to come up with something that is acceptable. The big problem is the same ID that allowed you to vote last time is no longer acceptable (Voter ID Card). If you try to vote with say, your voter ID card and your Passport, you will be turned away. Your passport allows to to travel from country to country but is not sufficient to allow you to vote in your own country.
DeleteIf you live with someone else, utility bills will not have your name on them.
Yes, eligible voters will be able to vote as long as they understand the new rules and jump through the hoops to gather what they need. Many people will not understand or even know about these changes and will be denied their vote.
Overreaction in my opinion. The vast majority of people who want to vote will be able to do just that without any issue at all. Those who really want to vote and have problem with ID will find a way to do it. And those who can't find a way around it probably shouldn't be voting in the first place!
DeleteAnd is Canada also like the United States where those who don't want ID to have to be shown are also the ones who don't want the voters rolls updated and purged -- of those who have died, sold their homes and moved etc?
DeleteLike the US, Canada has had very few cases of actual, proven voting fraud. Voter suppression is not and never has been intended to stop or reduce voter fraud, it is to keep the number of voters down and to make it hard for certain groups to vote. When pressed, those advocating voter suppression have not been able to back their fraud claims with actual facts.
DeleteA study conducted by the Law Department of Loyola University turned up 31, yes 31 cases of alleged voter fraud in the US since the year 2000. 31 out of about one billion votes cast are alleged to be fraudulent. I don't know how many zeros there are in a billion but that is a pretty small percentage and remember, these are alleged, not proven.
DeleteIn 2012 the State of Florida attempted to purge 182,000 people from the voters list. This move was blocked by the Department of Justice after initial investigation showed only 50 from this list were identified as being ineligible to vote. The vast majority of the list were minorities. The 50 they did find had not necessarily attempted to vote, their names had just somehow found their way onto the voters list.
DeleteThanks for the link Croft.
ReplyDeleteShared to my fb.
Kevin is absolutely right. You are over reacting. Absolutely nothing has changed. The only thing that has changed is that people are actually paying attention to the rules now.
ReplyDelete"If you are a student living away from home your ID may not have the address of your dormitory on it." That's because as a student, your riding is where you normally live, ie. with your parents. When I was a student, I always had ID of where I was living because I was independent, but my fellow students who weren't would vote by special ballot (through the mail) to vote in their home riding.
We don't have a 'voter ID card.' We have a voter information card that confirms where we're supposed to vote. That has never been a valid form of ID. You need ID with your address or some proof of address to show that you are who you say you are and that you are voting in the correct riding. That's where the proof of address comes in.
Lol...isn't there a "like" button here somewhere...?
DeleteThe fact remains, they are trying to stop something that does not happen often enough to worry about, voter fraud. Last Federal election, the only thing I offered was my voter ID (information) card. She marked me off and asked for nothing more.
DeleteYou need to stop calling it a "Voter ID card". No such thing exists in Canada, and it never has.
DeleteIf the person at the voter station marked you off and didn't ask for proper identification, then it was that person who did something wrong.
So, if the problem of voter fraud doesn't happen often enough to worry about, then either does the problem of not being able to come up with enough ID to vote. So that's not enough to worry about either.
It's the same thing as people getting up in arms about the 'new rules' at the border. There are no new rules. It's just that there is more stringent enforcement. If you've been voting at the same poll for ages and it's the same return officer who knows you're you and that you're voting in the correct riding. Everything's fine. But if you're someone like me who bounces around a bit, of course it makes sense that I should have to prevent supporting documentation that I'm voting in the correct riding.
DeleteWho knew that voter suppression was an international "conservative" tactic. And it's outrageous that you can't use a passport. Presumably your name only shows on the list at the correct polling place, so if you have a passport and your name isn't on the list, then presumably you shouldn't vote. And if your name *is* on the list, then there seems to be no good reason to not accept a passport, especially in a national election. Maybe there's justification for requiring an ID with an address for a strictly local election, but as you amply point out, there's no voter fraud problem, so why all the precautions?
ReplyDeleteIt's the same in the USA: lots of bellowing about supposed "voter fraud," yet careful studies reveal that there's virtually none, and none that could sway even close elections.
This seems to be a "solution" in search of a problem.
Saludos,
Kim G
Boston, MA
Where we believe the various assaults on civil rights -- freedom of speech, voting rights, travel rights -- is nothing short of outrageous and undemocratic.