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Too much, too late?
?Last week we published our schedule of all-candidate forums for the upcoming municipal election, giving as we promised a separate night for each seat on Council, creating ample opportunity for candidates to be heard and for you, the voter, to ask the questions you need to ask. We spread the forums over three weeks, making the mayoralty forum the grand finale at the Music Hall on Oct. 17.
Well, hardly was the ink dry on last week’s issue than the phone calls and e-mails began to come in from candidates and voters alike, objecting strongly to our schedule. The objections were of three varieties.
The first cause for concern was that we had scheduled three of our eight forums on Sunday evenings (including the mayoralty one), apparently creating a conflict for both churchgoers and those wishing to spend traditional time with the family. If you were to check the Uxbridge calendar through the winter months, we suspect you will find plenty of community events scheduled for Sunday evenings, everything from hockey games to concerts and classes of all kinds. Besides, municipal elections come only every four years, and attending an all-candidate forum could be considered a constructive family activity. And we wanted the Music Hall for the mayors; once the season begins, it’s only available Sundays. But never mind, we’ll skip Sundays.
The second objection was that in order to hear all the candidates for whom they could vote, Jane and Jerry Citizen would have to attend four forums, for mayor, regional councillor, ward councillor and school board. True, but we repeat our argument that we’ll only bother you once every four years. In 2006, the forums droned on forever, and half the audience had disappeared by the time things got meaty. This way, each evening will be shorter and much more to the point. And even if people only attend one or two forums, we hope the overall proportion of voters attending will be higher. We’ll stick to our eight-forum plan (even if they’re jammed closer together), and see how it works.
And they will be closer together, because the most vocal objection was that many of our forums were too late in the campaign. Nomination day is Sept. 10, election day Oct. 25, a span of six and a half weeks. This is a much shorter campaign than in 2006; the election date was moved up, but the nomination day wasn’t. We have a mail-in ballot system here in Uxbridge, and the ballots are mailed out Oct. 1, less than half-way through the campaign. Statistics show that a large proportion of voters mail back their ballots within a few days of receiving them, meaning that by Oct. 7 many of the ballots could be already filled out. Half of our forums were scheduled for after that date.
This underlines a fundamental flaw with the mail-in ballot; it doesn’t allow near enough time for campaigning. Campaigning in the summer, (if you’ve declared yourself that soon, and there’s no obligation to) is pretty hit and miss; you’ll waste a lot of time going to empty houses. So Sept. 10 is actually about right for starting to knock on doors; if you had 45 days, you might be able to do them all. But in 27 days, there’s no hope. There are a lot of people you won’t reach in person before they fill out their ballot.
We’re nostalgic for the old polling station. Voting was a social occasion, and actually making the trek to mark your “X” somehow made it a dignified and solemn civic duty. We doubt that in the long run, mail-in ballots will increase voter participation at all. But we could be wrong, and if we are, at least send out the ballots later. Give the candidates time to make their voice heard.
We’ll have our revised electoral forum schedule in next week’s Cosmos.
