Facebook friends Elections Canada

Elections Canada and Facebook are teaming up to boost voter turnout this election - particularly among the nations’ youth.

The social media site will mark the United Nations’ International Day of Democracy on Tuesday with a message to its millions of Canadian users of voting age, reminding them to ensure they’re registered to vote in the Oct. 19 federal election.

The message will show up in users’ news feeds three times that day with a link at the bottom to the Elections Canada website, where users can check their voter registration.

“Facebook is a place where Canadians go to talk about what matters to them,” says Kevin Chan, head of public policy for Facebook Canada.

There are about 20 million Canadians using the social media site on a monthly basis.

Last month, the company’s analysis found that 2.5 million Canadian users had 14.5 million interactions on Facebook about the election, Chan tells Yahoo Canada News.

“People always question do Canadians actually care about the election; do they care about the election in August, the middle of summer?” he says. “When you look at these numbers it shows that, in fact, Canadians are very much engaged with this election, even in the summer.”

But there’s been much handwringing about the declining voter turnout in Canadian elections. Voter turnout in the last federal election in 2011 was 61.1 per cent – just slightly up from the all-time low of 58.8 per cent in 2008, according to Election Canada.

For comparison, prior to 1993, voter turnout in Canada was typically between 70 and 80 per cent.

New rules put in place by the Conservative government since the last election may make it yet more difficult for students, seniors, indigenous voters and the homeless Canadians to cast ballots. The Fair Elections Act requires voters to show identification such as a driver’s licence or other legal ID at the polling booth.

Chief Electoral Officer Marc Mayrand welcomed the public service – read: free – voter outreach efforts from Facebook.

“With over 20 million Canadian users, Facebook is an ideal platform to spread awareness of voter registration. And what better day to encourage Canadians to check, update and complete their registration than Sept. 15th, the International Day of Democracy,” Mayrand says in a statement.

Voter turnout among youth, in particular, has been embarrassingly low in recent years.

In 2011, 38.8 per cent of eligible voters aged 18-24 cast ballots, compared to 75.1 per cent of voters aged 65-74, according to Elections Canada.

Chan says Facebook expects to reach millions of eligible voters with the one-day campaign.

“When we’re talking about numbers on that kind of scale, we’re really talking about reaching everyone, including younger voters,” he says.

Twitter Canada says most of its users plan to cast ballots next month and most of their votes are still up for grabs.

The social media company has released a study of 1,000 eligible Canadian voters – 500 of them Twitter users and 500 of them not – that found 86 per cent of Twitter users surveyed plan to vote. Fifty-nine per cent of them are undecided.

The company says its users are more engaged than non-users in the election but both groups care about the same issues: the economy, healthcare, taxes and jobs and employment.