If you're keeping an eye on turnout...

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Submitted by Ian King on November 15, 2008 - 4:08pm.

Advance voting turnout in Vancouver has been high this year, with over 15,000 votes cast compared to 8,763 in 2002's advance polls. This should be good news if for Vision Vancouver or COPE supporters.

It's well understood that in Vancouver, a high voter turnout favours left-of-centre candidates.The catch here, though, is that many of the advance voting days were held when the top story in the election wasn't the Olympic Village bailout -- instead it was bike lanes or the Burrard Bridge or Robertson's unpaid TransLink ticket.Those votes are locked in, but the ones cast on the last two advance voting days may be moved by other issues.

Through the 1990s, when the Non-Partisan Association took most of the seats, turnout was typically in the low-to-mid thirties. By contrast, it was nearly 50% in the Larry Campbell-led COPE landslide of 2002.

When the NPA took a majority on all three boards in 2005, turnout was 32.4% -- but as I pointed out in the Tyee after the 2005, vote, it wasn't as sharp a drop as it seemed. Local voters' lists are drawn from the provincial and federal lists, and in 2005, Elections BC ran an aggressive voter registration drive. The number of registered voters in Vancouver went from 280,055 in 2002 to 407,040 three years later -- and in the process, turnout looked to have fallen far more than it actually did.

The number of ballots dropped off by a little less than 8,000, meaning a drop of about 10-12,000 votes.