19 Oct Astonishing e-voting numbers

An astonishing number of Nova Scotians have snapped up the chance to vote electronically in the municipal elections that will wrap up Saturday.

In the Halifax Regional Municipality, 22.5 percent of eligible voters cast ballots on line or by phone-—not all that surprising until you realize that only 36.2 percent of eligible voters bothered going to the polls in the 2008 election.

You might expect HRM, home to the best educated, most affluent voters in the region, to embrace e-voting. But then what are we to make of working class CBRM, where 32.8 percent of the 82,223 eligible voters cast ballots on line or over the phone? That compares to a total turnout of just 50.4 percent in the last municipal election.

The difference could reflect varying interest in the two campaigns. In HRM, former MP Mike Savage is coasting to a landslide win. In CBRM, two starkly different candidates are battling for the soul of the Island.

Ah, but then what explains Victoria County, where 37 per cent of eligible voters cast ballots online by last Tuesday’s deadline? That compares to a total turnout of 60.6 percent last time. In Victoria County’s District 6, which encompasses the village of Ingonish, 60.1 percent of voters cast electronic ballots. Who would have predicted that?

Perhaps part of the reason voter turnout has fallen in recent years is that we made it damned inconvenient to vote, especially in rural areas.

Whatever the reason for Nova Scotia’s enthusiastic embrace of e-voting, it’s going to make election night analysis problematic. E-vote tallies will be released the moment the polls close. In some cases, that will mean half the total vote, or more. But will they be predictive? Cautious pundits will be unwilling to assume that the preferences of on-line voters will match those of citizens who trudge to the polls.

In 1948, US pollsters took it for granted that households with telephones reflected voters as a whole. nThen didn’t. Republican households had more phones, and were therefore oversampled. That led to this bit of egg-on-the-face:

(For those too young to get the joke, New York Governor Thomas Dewey did not, despite the confident predictions of every pollster and pundit in the the USA, defeat President Harry S. Truman, who is pictured here, grinning.)