Measures to increase accuracy of the Register – CEO Appearance: Supplementary Estimates (B) 2019-20

Subject: Measures to increase accuracy of the Register

Key Message

• For this general election, the agency carried out several initiatives to improve services to electors and make it even easier for them to exercise their democratic right to vote.
• These activities allowed Elections Canada to greatly improve the accuracy of the Register, leading to the highest quality ever recorded in the preliminary lists since its creation 20 years ago.

Facts

Initiatives to improve the accuracy of the Register

Elections Canada undertook several special initiatives earlier in 2019, beyond the processing of its regular data sources:

• In January and September of 2019, the agency mailed letters to potential new electors (between 18 and 27 years old) directing them to its online platform to complete their registration and verify their eligibility. More than 41,000 new electors were added to the Register as a result of this initiative.
• In the spring of 2019, Elections Canada sent verification letters to 250,000 electors who were in the Register, but whose records had not been updated through our various data sources since before the 2015 general election. As required by law prior to removing them from the Register, the agency wrote to these electors and asked them to confirm the accuracy of their information. As a result, some 223,000 elector records were removed from the Register.
• The passage of Bill C-76 gave Elections Canada the authority to obtain information on foreign nationals and permanent residents in Canada from Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC). In June 2019, the agency mailed letters to people who were potentially not qualified to vote based on this new information. The letter informed them that they would be removed from the Register unless they confirmed that they were qualified to vote. Over 74,000 persons did not respond and were removed from the Register in August 2019.
• As a result of cross-referencing administrative data, including the new IRCC data, with individual records of potential electors who had previously consented and stated that they were qualified to vote, the agency was able to add more than 900,000 electors to the Register before the call of the election.
• In the months leading up to the call of the election (June 25th to Sept 10th), Elections Canada promoted its online voter registration services on social media. This among other outreach and promotional initiatives yielded 231,391 visits to the Online Voter Registration service and an additional 29,993 updates/registrations (address changes or new voters).

The retrospective report will include more analysis on the quality of the lists, comparisons to previous years, and the effectiveness of the quality improvements.