Ryan Wilkes, BA/BScThe low percentage of youth participation in politics around the world is alarming and disappointing. From my own experiences and with discussing it with people our age, the excuses that are provided for the younger demographic to not cast a vote are all mainly due to a lack of knowledge about the political parties. Either that or a complete lack of motivation to get out and be heard in the polls. It seems that most of the youth have no interest in voting, this being supported by only 38.8% of voters aged 18-24 participating in the 2011 federal election. This project gave us the opportunity to motivate and inspire the public (focusing on youth) to participate in this upcoming election. From the beginning we remained neutral and objective when gathering parties information to provide a basic platform of their standings and presenting it in a user friendly way. Hopefully this, along with this website that we set-up to guide youth to check if they were registered to vote, then we have had some positive impact on the low participation of youth voters. Even if we inspire just a handful of voters, we can feel proud of what we have advocated for over the past few weeks.
|