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An election how-to for kids

Politics 101

I have spoken a number of times in this column about youth engagement and helping younger children to understand the issues and processes that make up our political system.

I have suggested that our youth are not likely to be brought into the political system unless our political parties focus on those things that youth see as relevant to their lives.

I was not suggesting that we stop trying to help our young people understand the system.

So this week I want to provide a parent "how-to" to explaining the electoral process to children. It is perfect timing as the B.C. election looms and we can watch the process evolve along with our kids.

This primer will help you to explain what will happen on election day.

The first part of the discussion you need to have is to introduce your child to the political parties and independents who will be involved in the election.

This is interesting because we usually don't bother confusing the situation with independents and other parties but in some parts of the province the independents might come into play. You can decide if you are going to talk about the independent candidates.

You can look at the websites of the different parties and perhaps find an issue you and your child would like to follow until the election.

What subject interests your child?

If your child is interested in the environment then find out what each party says about their plans for environmental policy. Or perhaps you could follow party platforms about education.

The key is to try to find a subject that interests your child.

Another thing you can do is to visit Elections B.C. to find out who are the candidates and parties running in your riding. You can use Elections B.C.'s Know Your Electoral District locator.

For the very basics, start this way:

Take a large piece of paper and draw 85 boxes on the page. Then cut out small pieces of colored paper that represent the different parties. You won't need 85 of each because you can just provide a few examples to show your child how each riding works.

In one box put one small colored piece of paper for each party.

So for each you should have four small pieces of paper in the box: red for Liberal, orange for NDP, blue for Conservative and green for Green.

Tell your learner that each one of those pieces of paper represents a person and each one of those people wants to win that box. Then explain that citizens get to choose which person they want to win the box and the person who gets the most votes wins the box.

So let's say that the blue candidate got 15 votes and the red candidate got 30 votes and the orange candidate got 40 votes and the green candidate got 15 votes, then the orange candidate wins the box because they got the most votes.

Put the orange piece of paper in that box on its own and remove the others.

Now repeat this for a few more boxes and have different outcomes. For example, the next box might be won by the red party.

After you have done a few you can explain that this process is repeated for each box and then Elections B.C. counts up which party (or colour) got the most boxes.

The party (or colour) with the most boxes wins and becomes the government.

You can say that the other people who won the boxes still get to play but they don't have as much power.

Obviously the more sophisticated your learner the more complex you can make your explanation.

In fact you might ask an older child to add up how many votes were cast for all the other parties in the box.

You can show your learner that the party that won only had 40 votes and that all the other parties added together had 60 votes. This leads to good discussion about our electoral system which, by the way, is called "first-past-the-post" or single-member plurality.

It will also help you to explain the difference between the popular vote and the number of seats won by the different parties.

On election night you can watch with your child to see who wins each box.