ABSTRACT
Did the COVID-19 pandemic impact citizens' comfort voting in-person? Did it influence their decision to vote, and if so, which method they used to cast their ballot? This article presents public opinion data from the first five Canadian provinces to hold elections during the COVID-19 pandemic: New Brunswick, Saskatchewan, British Columbia, Newfoundland and Labrador, and Nova Scotia. We find that comfort voting in person can be predicted by a person's assessment of their own and their families' COVID risk, as well as their interest in, and the importance that they place on, the act of voting. Those with higher risk, and the psychological engagement with politics that likely led to great awareness of some of the risks the pandemic posed to society, were less comfortable with in person voting. Additionally, we find that those uncomfortable voting in person were more likely to not vote at all, or when they did vote, to use the mail-in voting option. Although advance in-person voting was recommended to avoid election day crowds, comfort voting in-person could not predict in-person advance voting when compared to election day voting.
ABSTRACT
The COVID-19 pandemic has created yet another dimension of performance on which governments can be judged during elections. This article focuses on how the pandemic and its management factored into vote choices in provincial elections in Canada. Did pandemic considerations overwhelm other factors, or was it a tangential consideration? We address this question with data from a series of two-wave election surveys that were conducted by the Consortium on Electoral Democracy (C-Dem) using online samples of citizens. © 2023 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.