By Tina Comeau
THE VANGUARD
NovaNewsNow.com
Port Maitland knows how to get out the youth vote for a byelection. And hopefully these voters will still go to the polls when they’re really old enough to vote.
In Allen Whittaker’s Grade 3 classroom at Port Maitland Consolidated School on June 21 – one day before Yarmouth voters went to the polls in the real byelection ¬– students and staff voted in their own version of the Yarmouth MLA byelection.
The vote was run by Whittaker’s Grade 3 students whose jobs included returning officer, poll clerks, candidate agents, etc. Whittaker hopes the effort translates into higher voter turnout when the students become voting age, since low voter turnout in elections is a concern. It’s a message he’s been passing onto his students for years.
“It seems that every year we have either a federal election, provincial election or a municipal election, so with the political climate it’s perfect, every year I can run my Grade 3 class through this is how you run an election, this is why we run it,” Whittaker said, explaining he told his students, “We can’t all go to Halifax to express our opinions and our needs and our wants, so we’ve got to choose somebody to do this for us.”
A few days before the vote, candidates in the Yarmouth byelection were invited to the school to introduce themselves and to talk about the importance of voting.
PC candidate Charles Crosby reminded the students about how veterans had fought and died in wars to secure their freedom so that they would have the opportunity to vote.
Independent candidate Belle Hatfield talked about ways people can make a difference in their community, like running for public office.
NDP candidate John Deveau said because there are so many things that fall under the responsibility of government – roads, health, education – it’s important to have a say in who makes decisions on the issues.
And Jonathan Dean of the Atlantica Party encouraged the students to not only think about voting themselves, but to talk to their parents about the importance of voting.
Before the votes were counted at the school, student Vanessa Maillet, the returning officer for the vote, was eager to find out who would win. Even better, she said she is eager to one day vote in a real election.
With a couple of exceptions, the school byelection result was pretty close to June 22 outcome. In the school byelection Liberal candidate Zach Churchill won with 47 votes. In second place was Crosby with 41 votes. Hatfield placed third with 11 votes. Dean was fourth with seven votes. John Percy of the Green Party was fifth with five votes, and Deveau placed last with two votes.
While the Yarmouth riding experienced a voter turnout of roughly 60 per cent, the school had an 84.6 per cent voter turnout. (It would have been higher had the Grade 6’s not been at the beach on their class trip.)
There were 19 spoiled ballots. The majority of ballots had to be rejected because the voters had not marked them with an X. One ballot, though, was rejected because the voter was a little too enthusiastic when they wrote on their ballot, “Yeah! Go Charles!”
