In recent years, young people have been notoriously hard to get out to voting stations. One website is giving more civic-minded young people a way to persuade their peers to vote.
Through a text or a social media message, voteparty.ca lets millennials make plans to go vote together on Oct. 19.
“And then head out to a party and meet some other people and kind of make a fun Monday out of it. We're hoping that in this way it's not intimidating. It creates a personal one to one connection that is missing from a lot of election get your vote out campaigns right now,” said spokesperson Crystal Chan.
Ilona Dougherty, co-founder of Apathy Is Boring, an organization that works to increase youth political participation, says that kind of personalized strategy is effective.
“The research shows us that face to face engagement and talking to young people, asking them to vote is the best way to get them out to the polls,” she said.
But getting the message through to young people has been a major challenge, she said. Over the last 40 years the youth vote rate has decreased significantly -- in 2011, only 38.8 per cent of young Canadians voted.
Chan said she hopes encouraging her peers to encourage others to vote will help change that trend.
