With the low voter turnout in last week's provincial election in the news, I find myself thinking of my grandmother.
My grandmother has been losing her faculties for some time, but between the last election and this one, she's being diagnosed with Alzheimer's and put in a nursing home. I don't know if she voted, and I don't know if there's any mechanism other than logistics to stop her from voting if she wants to. However, I do know that she's probably not competent to vote - she has enough memory problems that she simply cannot develop an informed political opinion - and I do know that she's most likely still on the voter's list at her old address, where she lived and received a voter card for every election for 60 years.
In calculating voter turnout, she counted as a no-show. But if she didn't vote, that isn't actually a problem.
As the population ages, we're going to have more and more people in my grandmother's situation. I wonder if this will be enough to affect overall voter turnout numbers?
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