Advance poll turnout drops

Elections Canada said late last night that 1.46 million Canadians cast their ballots in advance polls, a decrease from the 1.56 million who exercised their franchise early in 2006.

Not sure what to make of that number. Generally speaking, a high turnout favours challengers while a low turnout favours incumbents.

But if that's the case, consider this: in my riding of Carleton-Mississippi Mills, Conservative Gordon O'Connor won by a country mile in 2006 and is widely expected to do so again this year. But this year there were 10,493 ballots cast in advance polls, which is more than all the advance ballots cast in the entire province of Newfoundland or the entire province of PEI. Does a high advance poll number put a charge, then, in his Liberal challenger Justin McKinnon?

The advance polls here were second busiest to the polling stations in the Quebec riding of Louis-Hébert where 11,239 electors have voted. In 2006, Conservative Luc Harvey just clipped BQ incumbent Roger Clavet by 231 votes. What does a high advance turnout mean for Harvey?

Third busiest riding in the country for advance polling was right next door to mine — the riding of Nepean-Carleton with 10,337 votes cast. Conservative Pierre Poilievre got 55 per cent of all votes cast in 2006 and is expected to win again this year.

So the busiest three ridings in the country all have Conservative incumbents? Is that a trend?

Well, the trend goes bust at the fourth busiest riding — it's the Toronto-area riding of Thornhill where Liberal Susan Kadis is trying to fend off Conservative Peter Kent. Even without Kent, a high-profile TV news anchor, the Conservatives thought this was ripe for the picking and, so far, 9,440 electors have already made a choice.

Here's the rest of the top ten busiest ridings:

Lanark–Frontenac–Lennox and Addington: 8,717 (Incumbent: Cons Scott Reid)

Trois-Rivières 8,700 (Incumbent: BQ Paule Brunelle)

Laurentides–Labelle 8,592 (Incumbent: BQ Joanne Deschamps)

Simcoe–Grey 8,591 (Incumbent: Cons Helena Guergis)

Vaudreuil-Soulanges 8,512 (Incumbent: BQ Meili Faille)

Beauport–Limoilou 8,400 (Incumbent: Cons Sylvie Boucher)

OK — now we have the beginnings of a trend. First of all — the busiest ridings in the country when it comes to advance polls are, generally speaking, not held by Liberal or NDP incumbents. (In addition to Kadis at number 4, Kingston and the Islands where Liberal Speaker of the House Peter Milliken is running was 14th and Ottawa Centre where NDP MP Paul Dewar was running was 15th.) Among the ten slowest ridings in the country for advance polling, just three are held by Tories and the rest are held by the NDP and Liberals.

Is there anything to that?

Well, here's my best shot: there is some evidence to suggest that the Conservatives are the best party at this point for GOTV — Get Out The Vote — with sophisticated database tracking tools and so on. A key component of a good GOTV effort is to get people to vote for your guy as soon as possible. The more of your supporters you can get to advance polls, the fewer you have to track down on election day.

So looking again at our busiest ridings — I'd say the common denominator would be an active and mobilized Tory vote — whether it's to re-elect a heavily favoured incumbent like O'Connor or to put a challenger — like former senator Michael Fortier in Vaudreuil-Soulanges or Peter Kent in Thornhill — over the top. I'm not so sure about Laurentides-Labelle but I can tell you that the Tories are putting significant effort into the other ridings in our top ten list.

Technorati Tags: elections