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Elections BC taps Emily Carr students to get more young people to the polls

By Laura Rodgers —
CUP B.C. Bureau Chief
VANCOUVER (CUP)

Ve few young
people vote in BC
provincial elections.
To try and change this,
Elections BC is getting
creative.

A recently-launched
partnership between
Elections BC and
Vancouver’s Emily Carr
University of Art and
Design has created a new
course called “Designing
for Democracy.”

In it, up-and-coming
creatives get university
credit for putting together
a campaign encouraging
more 18-to-24-year-
olds to vote. Elections
BC hopes the resulting
student-designed
campaigns will get more
young voters to the
polls by the May 2013
provincial election.

“Youth are one of
those groups that are
under-represented on
the provincial voters
list, so we are looking at
ways to increase youth
voter registration,” said
Don Main, Elections
BC communications
manager. In the last
provincial election in
2009, only 27 per cent of
eligible BC voters age 18
to 24 voted, as compared
to 54 per cent of those 25
and up.

The course, which is
running from September
to December of this year,
has students from various
design areas work in
groups to try and address
BC’s chronic under-
engagement of young
voters.

Because most of the
students themselves
are between 18 and 24,
Elections BC is confident
that they’Il be able to
reach young voters on
their own turf. “It seemed

6

like a logical step to have
youth preparing materials
for youth,” said Main.
Emily Carr professor
Chris Hethrington, who
is teaching the course,
thinks it’s a valuable
way for students to learn

66

The course, which is running from September to December
of this year, has students from various design areas
work in groups to try and address B.C. 5 chronic under-

that Facebook and
Tumblr held particular
value, but they decided
to place less emphasis on
Twitter campaigning.

“Our brainstorming
revealed that, actually,
Twitter wasn’t as

engagement of young voters.

through the real-world
experience of designing a
campaign for a client.
“Tt’s more like a real-

world job situation,” said
Hethrington.” There are
challenges in the scope
of this kind of project

commonly used

as a vehicle for
communication in that
target age group,” said
Hethrington. “So that’s
kind of surprising, but it

was interesting.”

As well as planning
a social-media blitz, the
class is also floating ideas
like plopping fake voting
booths into SkyTrain
stations and printing
polling-station maps

to lay on the floor of
TransLink buses. They’re
also working on more
traditional advertising
avenues, like print ads
and a web site.

Students will deliver
their final advertising
concepts to Elections
BC next month. If all
goes well, the students’
concepts will be used
as part of a voter-
engagement campaign in
anticipation of an update
of BC’s voting rolls next
March.

Hethrington
hopes that the project
will benefit not just
the students taking
the course, but also
democratic engagement
across the province. “The
students really brought
their own unique, innate
knowledge of their own
target audience. That’s
one of the great benefits
of this project,” he said.

 

that [students] haven’t
experienced before.”

In the 19-student
class within Emily
Carr’s Faculty
of Culture and
Community,
students worked in
groups, designing
everything from social
media-strategies to
environmental art in
an effort to get out the
vote.

“We didn’t know
what we were going
to deliver when
we started,” said
Hethrington. He
encouraged students
to brainstorm new and
creative ways to reach
young people, and to
take there own habits
into account.

Hethrington
explained that, as
the students in the
class did research and
discussed the ways
that they consume
information, they
learned that certain
types of social media
might be more useful
than others.

The class decided

 

   

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