Ontario election sees low turnout in advance polls

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National Post’s Chris Selley and National Post contributor Anthony Furey discuss the latest in the 2025 Ontario election. Watch the video or read the transcript.

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Anthony Furey: Hi, I’m Anthony Furey and I’m here with National Post columnist Chris Selley discussing the latest with the Ontario election. Chris, this past weekend we had the advanced voting days, three advanced days. Normally, or at least in most recent elections, there have been about six days. This one, there were three and we have found it is pretty much the lowest turnout for advanced polls ever. A lot of number, numerically speaking, 675,000 people turned out to vote, but that is apparently much less than we have had in past advanced votes. It’s about 6.1 per cent. And in previous elections, it’s been higher sixes all the way up to 10 per cent of people voting in the advanced voting days. What do you make of this, Chris, and is this a sign of the general turnout to come on the Thursday election?

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Chris Selley: I would think so. I mean, it seems to me that especially in an election that’s sort of a foregone conclusion, if you’re going to bother voting, you might as well do it early. There’s no point taking time out of your Thursday to do that. And I guess that, and yeah, it just speaks, I guess, to the motivation. Obviously, we don’t know who voted for whom in the early votes, but it certainly suggests a lack of enthusiasm among the electorate, which is bad news first and foremost for the opposition parties that are trying to make a dent in Ford’s majority, and they don’t seem to be doing it.

Furey: One thing, I’d like to get your thoughts on this more broadly Chris, about advanced voting and where we’re headed in Canadian society, or at least in Ontario, is we have seen an uptick in the past decade, I guess, in terms of the people going to the advanced polls and I feel like psychologically for a lot of people we actually have like four-day or six-day elections and the main election day is just the day you go to if you haven’t made the earlier ones. I know political strategists and campaigners and myself, now having experience with campaigns, how we think about it. That’s just your last day to get people to the polls, but you’re working very aggressively to get them out on the advanced voting as well. Do you think it’s fair to say that people have changed the way they think about advanced voting?

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Selley: It does seem to be the case, yeah. As turnout goes down, advanced turnout seems to go up, if that makes sense. The number of people voting, total, is not going up, but the number of people who want to get it out of the way early do seem to be going up. I think it’s something we discussed last week about, the Progressive Conservatives just dropped their platform on Monday after those days of advanced polling. You, I mean, you kind of know what you’re going to get with Doug Ford, there’s no question. And there weren’t really any surprises in this platform, although the term $40 billion is winging its way around the news. You know, I kind of feel like people should know about $40 billion before they go to the ballot box. But I don’t think, but since nobody, nobody’s really challenging him on the spending for the tariffs, even though we don’t even know what the tariffs are gonna be yet, there doesn’t seem to be any risk there. But in general, I think it’s a good idea to spread things out. I’m in favour of making it easier to vote as long as it’s secure and can’t be rigged or anything, at least at the ballot box. I know this, foreign actors constantly try to do that.

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Furey: I’m a traditionalist, I’m a big fan of the old paper ballots and I have had that experience being a scrutineer, watching the ballots being folded, everyone huddling around the table. There are some Ontario municipalities that actually already have phone and internet voters, smaller ones, none of the major cities have it. I am adamantly opposed to that being expanded to larger cities in Ontario, but Chris what do you think about that?

Selley: Yeah, I like the idea in principle. As I say, of making it easy to vote, but there is certainly a security element there that needs to be taken into account. If you just look at the way that party leadership contests go, and those are not under the scrutiny of Elections Ontario or Elections Canada, at the federal level, and the stuff that goes on in some of those races, you know, if it happened in a general election, people would be outraged. But at the party level, it seems to be just taken for granted that there can be all kinds of shenanigans. And I think there’s a danger there that that could bleed into the overall system, if you just do let people vote online. Because, at the end of the day, how really, how can you prove that someone is who they say they are? It’s very difficult to do.

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Furey: Just to circle back to what you’re saying about the PC’s dropping the platform after some of those advanced vote days, it’s quite something that that in itself wasn’t a story or a mini scandal. Usually in elections we have this pressure, when are you going to release your own carbon pricing plan? When are you going to release your costed platform? There’s been none of that during this election in terms of the expectations placed upon a party to deliver us some goods. That’s quite remarkable.

Selley: Yeah, and I was thinking also about some of these candidates that were revealed to have said horrible things on the internet in the past. Those haven’t really blown up either, the way they would have. These were some nasty misogynist things. Bonnie Cromby says, well, it was 10 years ago. The guy looks about 50. I mean, who was he when he was 40? A lot of the traditional things that seem to take hold in these election campaigns just haven’t this time.

Furey: Alright, let’s leave it at that. Thanks for watching everyone.

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