A lot of people don’t vote in Toronto elections.
To figure out how to mobilize the disengaged electorate, a new
Maytree commissioned study sought to get some intel on Toronto’s eligible voters.
The research, conducted by Ryerson professor Dr.Myer Siemiatycki and geographic analyst Sean Marshal, analyzed voter turnout at both the ward and neighbourhood scales for the City of Toronto’s 2003, 2006, and 2010 elections. The results were then compared with key socio-economic characteristics of each ward and neighbourhood.
"The question we’ve asked in this data gathering and data collection is ‘what do we know about who votes in Toronto municipal elections and what do we know about who doesn’t vote in Toronto municipal elections?' " said Siemiatycki at recent Maytree conference.
"These are hard questions we’re trying to answer….there are about 1.6 million eligible voters in the city of Toronto...we're trying to get a handle on a huge number of people. No other constituency or electoral race is this country comes close to the gigantic number of eligable voters we have in the city of Toronto given the at-large mayoralty vote."
While Siemiatycki and Marshal are still continuing to delve into the data they've collected, some preliminary findings have emerged.
The most troubling of these, according to Siemiatycki, is the low voter turnout among the city’s immigrant population.
"One of the alarm bells from our research," he says "is that the highest negative predictor [of voter turnout] is areas with the highest immigrant population."
Siemiatycki also noted a strong spatial dimension to voter turnout - the lowest area of voter turnout is in the inner suburbs of Etobicoke, North York and Scraborough, the highest is in the core city of Toronto.
But while these demographic and spatial concentrations of low voter turnout point to a systemic problem, Siemiatycki notes, there’s still a lot of work to do figuring out why these patterns emerge and what policy makers can do to change them.
But, he says, the initial findings give some important clues. By tracking changes in neighborhood voter turnout over time, Siemiatycki and Marshal have discovered that campaigning, candidates, and community engagement can make a huge difference.
"Turnout is not forever fixed. Flemington Park, for example, was 125th [in voter turnout] in 2003, it was 19th in 2006. This was all thanks to a very strong community-based candidate.
"None of this is fixed and internal and changeable--the nature of the election race matters to voters."
Writer: Katia Snukal