Quantitative Research Study on Special Voting Rules 2019

Campus Electors
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

Prepared for:
Elections Canada
Office of the Chief Electoral Officer

Supplier name:
Advanis Inc.

Contract number: 05005-190331/001/CY

Contract value: $35,030 incl taxes

Award date: July 18, 2019

Delivery date: December 19, 2019

Registration number: POR 036-19

For more information on this report, please contact Elections Canada at rop-por@elections.ca.

Ce rapport est aussi disponible en français.

Executive Summary

As part of its post-mortems following general elections, Elections Canada seeks to obtain reliable survey data to evaluate electors' opinions, attitudes, and knowledge of the Agency's services along with various aspects of their experience with the electoral process. The Agency also asks campus administrators to share their experiences hosting voting places at post-secondary institutions. The Quantitative Research Study on Special Voting Rules 2019 project is made up of three separate surveys:

This report describes the methodology of the Survey of Campus Electors.

The target population was individuals who had the opportunity to vote on a post-secondary campus that was participating in the Vote on Campus program. Elections Canada designed the Survey of Campus Electors. The purpose of the Survey of Campus Electors was to collect campus electors' opinions, attitudes, and experiences in relation to the Vote on Campus program during the 2019 federal general election. These electors are part of the Vote on Campus program, introduced in 2015 as a pilot project. For the 43rd general election in 2019, this project was expanded to 121 campus voting offices located in 109 post-secondary institutions. This program provided the opportunity for electors to vote by special ballot at a voting place on campus from October 5 to 9, 2019.

The survey included questions around the following themes:

  1. awareness of the opportunity to vote on campus and sources of information
  2. voting method used
  3. reasons for not voting at the campus office
  4. socio-demographic information
  5. level of political interest

After survey design and programming were complete, Elections Canada created an email list of campus representatives at each institution whom it was able to reach, then sent emails to 103 contacts. They were asked to distribute the open survey links to an unknown number of campus electors (voters and non-voters). The primary intended respondents for this survey were students, but staff, faculty, and other non-students were also able to complete the survey. The survey was in field from October 16 to 30, 2019.

After closing the survey, Advanis was responsible for cleaning and preparing the survey data that were provided to Elections Canada in SPSS format. Elections Canada completed all open-ended coding. Tabulated data were produced for this study: results were categorized and presented by demographic information such as gender, age, level of education, occupation, language spoken at home, and province or territory of residence. Results were also tabulated by subpopulation groups such as the following:

Finally, results were tabulated by the general level of interest in politics, awareness of voting on campus, whether the elector did or did not vote in the 2019 election, and whether the elector lived on or off campus.

There is a potential for non-response bias, in that response rates can vary by campus and for certain demographic characteristics. Weights were not applied to the data, as it is difficult to determine the actual size of the eligible elector (voters and non-voters) population by campus. Any results with an unweighted base of 30 respondents or fewer should not be reported on, due to statistical robustness. Results with more than 30 but fewer than 50 respondents should be interpreted with caution and considered as directional guidelines only. The results of this survey will be used to inform future Elections Canada programs and services as they relate to campus electors.

Political Neutrality Certification

Political neutrality certification

I hereby certify as Senior Officer of Advanis that the deliverables fully comply with the Government of Canada political neutrality requirements outlined in the Policy on Communications and Federal Identity and the Directive on the Management of Communications.

Specifically, the deliverables do not include information on electoral voting intentions, political party preferences, standings with the electorate, or ratings of the performance of a political party or its leaders.

Signed,

Signature

Nicolas Toutant

Vice-President, Research and Evaluation

Advanis