{"id":3204,"date":"2024-02-29T15:56:08","date_gmt":"2024-02-29T20:56:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/newmajority.ca\/?p=3204"},"modified":"2024-03-08T18:02:34","modified_gmt":"2024-03-08T23:02:34","slug":"whats-scary-about-voting","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/newmajority.ca\/en\/whats-scary-about-voting\/","title":{"rendered":"What\u2019s Scary About Voting?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Chloe Tai is an Organizer on the New Majority leadership team, who has spoken to thousands of young people across Canada.<\/span><\/p>\n

When someone says, “your voice matters!\u2019\u2019 How does that feel to you?\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

I vividly remember sitting in class and being told my voice matters after a two- hour presentation by a guest-speaker at nine in the morning. I felt kind of sickly when I heard the stern rhetoric of \u201cyour voice matters!\u201d something my classmates and I had all routinely heard once every two years since the sixth grade. My brain immediately clocked voting as something for my eighteen year old self to figure out. Even then, I was never a denier of voting. I knew it was important – but just felt that it wasn\u2019t for me. My thoughts were that I didn’t know enough and was never going to know enough; my voice could matter but not so much in the grand scheme of things. Similar thoughts held true for most of my peers at the time and I still hear similar things from so many people I speak to nowadays. This blog post covers resources I used to change my perspective on voting and what I share with my peers when I hear them expressing their more than relatable and relevant discomfort surrounding the voting process in Canada.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

I took the time to get more information about what Elections Canada is to better understand my role (and theirs) in voting in Canada.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

What is Elections Canada anyway?<\/b><\/h3>\n

Elections Canada is an independent, non-partisan, agency of Parliament, responsible for conducting federal elections in Canada. The agency has a mission to ensure that all Canadians can exercise their democratic rights to vote and be a candidate. Maintaining the integrity of the electoral process is at the core of everything Elections Canada does. As such, it has many safeguards throughout the electoral process and is the main source for getting accurate information and resources about the electoral system in Canada. Elections Canada strives to make voting as equally accessible to all Canadians as possible. Through research, Elections Canada knows that there is still work to do in addressing barriers to voting for certain groups of Canadians, which includes Indigenous electors, youth electors and electors with disabilities. In order to address these barriers, Elections Canada has developed the Inspire Democracy program, focused solely on understanding and addressing the barriers to electoral participation for the identified groups and other emerging communities.<\/span><\/p>\n

Here are some articles addressing voting for youth, research on barriers in place and resources to overcome those barriers:<\/span><\/p>\n