Your “protest vote” doesn’t count
Why you can’t spoil your ballot in a Canadian election
Earlier today, a friend posted on Facebook a message I’ve seen and heard a lot lately — to be honest, I’ve said it myself: Please vote, but if you don’t like anybody enough to vote, at least go spoil your ballot. I’ve repeated for years what I learned in school, and what my kids are learning now — they count spoiled ballots.
Well, it turns out spoiled protest votes are not counted, not in federal elections, at least.
This is an issue that needs to be addressed along with the rest of the democratic deficit in Canada. There is no formal way to make a statement by ruining a ballot in a federal election in Canada. They’re not counted as protest votes.
To understand this, you first have to understand how these terms are used by Elections Canada. The term “spoiled” ballots is used to describe ballots with mistakes — like if you make a mistake, they can mark it as “spoiled” and give you a replacement ballot to try again. Or if the ballot you receive is misprinted or blank, you can return it for a good ballot, and the bad one is marked as “spoiled”.
There’s another category of ballots called “rejected” ballots, which are ballots that are not known to have mistakes, but which do not count toward a candidate’s votes.
Ballots with deliberate protest messages are grouped with other non-votes as these “rejected” ballots.
In other words, a protest vote where you write a message on the ballot or fill in multiple boxes — or no boxes at all — is counted along with errors and other invalid votes. Yes, they are counted, but with two caveats:
First, it is impossible to know how many of them were protests, since they are grouped with other bad ballots that were not intended to be protest votes.
Second, the number of rejected ballots is rarely reported, probably because it is not considered to be particularly meaningful. For example, the official “complete” results of the 2011 federal election do not list rejected ballots for any riding.
Tangent: I’ll just calculate it myself
Rejected ballots are counted and reported along with valid votes to figure out the voter turnout, so we can figure out how many ballots were rejected: For instance, in the 2011 federal election, with 24,257,592 people on the list of electors, 14,823,408 ballots (valid and rejected) were counted, resulting in a turnout of 61.1%. Since 14,723,980 votes were cast for all of the candidates (according to Andrew Heard of Simon Fraser University), we can estimate that 99,428 votes were rejected in the 2011 federal election.
And that, as far as I can tell, is the first time somebody has run that number — that’s how little meaning the number of rejected ballots has. In other words, it is not a protest vote, and does not make a statement.
In contrast, some provinces allow people to “decline” to vote, which is counted as a separate category and is generally used as a protest. Looking at the 2014 Ontario election results (PDF file ahead), there were 29,937 declined ballots. If these were lumped together with rejected (22,885) and unmarked (12,124) ballots, then those protest votes would be almost half the total. But note that the numbers vary widely from riding to riding.
Unfortunately, for now at least, the Canada Elections Act does not recognize that same category.
So no, despite what you’ve heard, you cannot make a statement by spoiling or even declining your ballot in a federal election. And staying away from the polls isn’t any better — that’s not counted either and, worse yet, it’s indistinguishable from apathy.
Long story short — just vote. Pick the best option you have, and vote. Besides being a civic responsibility, voting is simply the only way to be counted, and the only way to make a statement.
