Just over half of eligible voters cast ballot on HST: Elections BC
By Contributor
More than 1.6 million British Columbians participated in the HST referendum, almost matching the turnout for 2009’s provincial election, Elections BC announced Thursday.
Roughly 52 per cent of registered voters submitted ballots by the Aug. 5 deadline.
However, while the BC government shaved a few million off its costs by switching from the traditional ballot box to the postage stamp method of casting votes, the shrapnel that BC’s democracy took to the chin have consumed those savings in spades regardless of how the vote comes down later this month, said IntegrityBC’s managing director Dermond Travis.
Before cheering too loudly over the estimated 52.2 per cent turnout of BC voters as announced by Elections BC this week, Travis said to keep in mind that this is still three per cent lower than the turnout in the last provincial election.
“It’s also a far cry from the 86 per cent turnout in the 2008 presidential Oregon mail-in vote that the Vancouver Sun‘s Vaughn Palmer cited this week in defence of the mail-in vote process,” said Travis in a release.
And in theory, when one accounts for the close to 3.4 per cent of ballots rejected in the 2002 Treaty Negotiations, it’s entirely possible that fewer than one in four eligible British Columbians will have decided the fate of one of the most important tax policies ever to be voted on in a provincial referendum in Canada.
Elections BC says that as of July 22, 3,063,170 people were registered to vote. Each registered voter was mailed an HST referendum voting package beginning June 13, 2011. The results of the referendum are expected to be reported on or about Aug. 25.
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