Almost every transaction you conduct these days has the potential of putting your name on a list so you can be targeted by marketers. Voting shouldn鈥檛 be one of those transactions.
Justice Minister Suzanne Anton introduced legislation this week that would make several changes to the Elections Act. They relax some unnecessary restrictions, correct some anomalies and make it easier for British Columbians to vote. The amendments would bring some welcome improvements.
But several points down the list is this sleeper: The chief electoral officer, says a statement on the government鈥檚 website, will be required 鈥渢o provide a list of voters to registered political parties after an election that indicates which voters voted in that election.鈥�
You should vote, but whether you do or not is nobody鈥檚 business but your own. That鈥檚 not information that should be available to political parties, or anyone else.
The Elections sa国际传媒 website lists 23 registered political parties as of March 23. They include the usual suspects whose members occupy seats in the legislature, as well as some entities not so much in the public eye. Some examples: the Platinum Party of Employers Who Think and Act to Increase Awareness, the People鈥檚 Front, the Communist Party of sa国际传媒, the sa国际传媒 Marijuana Party and the Work Less Party of British Columbia.
Before you snicker over the names or actions of the more obscure parties, remember that the party in power in sa国际传媒 is the one that recruited a chief treaty commissioner and dumped him at the last minute, set up the office of a municipal auditor general that has turned into a huge embarrassment and spawned the ethnic outreach scandal of 2012.
Such things do not inspire confidence that a list of people who voted would be handled respectfully and sensitively.
Let鈥檚 give political parties their due. Most, if not all, are concerned about low voter turnout and work hard to get people to the polls. They put a lot of thought into formulating policies they believe will result in improvements. They are an essential part of the democratic process.
But politics is a game in which scoring the right points tends to take priority over doing the right thing.
This change was recommended by the Election Advisory Committee. Other than the chairman 鈥� the chief electoral officer 鈥� the committee consists only of representatives of political parties, scarcely a body that could be counted on to put the good of the people ahead of the welfare of the party.
Why do they want this change? Because it would be 鈥渁 tool that allows parties to engage voters on an ongoing basis,鈥� according to the committee鈥檚 minutes.
Parties already have access to the list of registered voters. That鈥檚 all they need to know. There are plenty of ways to 鈥渆ngage voters鈥� without knowing if they voted or not.
As IntegrityBC points out in a Facebook posting about this amendment, it takes only two people to become a registered political party. That opens a door for abuse in this age when personal information so easily becomes public. If you know who voted, you can extrapolate who didn鈥檛.
It would be disconcerting to hear: 鈥淚 notice you didn鈥檛 vote in the last election,鈥� from the candidate who comes knocking on your door. Suppose, in an exercise of public shaming, someone decided to post the names of those who didn鈥檛 vote. These are but two of many scenarios that could arise from the abuse of this information.
Anton鈥檚 bill contains useful and welcome changes to elections regulations, but making public the list of people who voted is neither useful nor welcome, except to political parties that would use it for their own benefit.
