Many of you know there are municipal, regional district and school board elections in mid-November. So why do so many people know about the elections but only a few do anything about it.
Why is the turnout for municipal elections much lower than provincial or federal levels?
In the last election three years ago just 47.56 per cent of Williams Lake voters cast ballots. While that figure is low, we did better than Quesnel at 40 per cent and 100 Mile House where a mere 36.13 per cent of the voters went to the polls. But we should not be too proud because anything under 50 per cent is just awful, and is not acceptable in my books.
Langford had less than a 14 per cent voter turnout. That is simply ridiculous. Bowen Island municipality had the highest turnout of voters for a civic election with 83.77 per cent. Wow.
It is known that younger people vote in fewer numbers than their older counterparts.
This election we have some younger folk running for council and that’s great … I hope they are able to get more young voters to cast ballots.
Why do young people who seem to want everything in this age of entitlement but don’t want to exercise their democratic right and cast a ballot during elections.?
Many people have trouble with such a big list of contestants when it comes to voting in a municipal election. We could have 10 or 11 people running for councillor this year and four campaigning for the mayor’s chair.
Who do you vote for this election with so many running for seven seats on council?
Too many people are cynical about politics and politicians. I hear people in the community say comments like, ‘all politicians are stupid, they don’t care about the voters, only themselves,’ ‘why should I vote, these politicians don’t listen to me and they do not care about me.’
It is sad to hear those kind of comments and I just wonder if they know that many local politicians put in a lot of time for the City of Williams Lake and it’s taxpayers.
You owe it to yourself to get out and vote, to learn about candidates and make an informed decision when it comes to putting an ‘X’ beside a person’s name on the voting ballot.
You get to decide who is going to run this city for the next four years but first you must vote.
Ken Wilson is a freelance columnist with the Tribune/Week
