The Accessibility of Elections to Canadians with Cognitive Disabilities
Bibliographic record
Abstract
It is enshrined in the Charter of Rights and Freedoms that all Canadian citizens are guaranteed the right to vote.This research paper explores whether persons with cognitive disabilities are able to exercise this right based on the accessibility provisions provided for in Canadian electoral law.A mixed methodology approach was used to investigate this topic, where qualitative interviews with persons with cognitive disabilities from countries and regions with similar social and policy contexts to Canada's were used to identify facilitators and barriers to voting.Canada's 14 different electoral acts were ranked based on the number of accessibility provisions they possessed that could facilitate voting.Ontario was identified as the jurisdiction with the most provisions that could facilitate voting in persons with cognitive disabilities.Trends in the secondary sourced data also revealed that a lack of electoral knowledge and a lack of social support were the most significant barriers to voting for persons with cognitive disabilities.A supportive social network was unanimously identified in the secondary data as a significant facilitator to voting.In fact, it was identified in the secondary data sources that persons with cognitive disabilities that did not have a supportive social network were unable to use the existing accessibility provisions in their region.This finding represents the limitations of Canada's current accessibility provisions in their ability to facilitate voting for persons with cognitive disabilities.None of Canada's provisions mandate that social service workers or election officials ensure that persons with cognitive disabilities receive the support they need to understand the electoral process prior to election day.This research paper makes the recommendation that such policy provisions are implemented in Canadian electoral law in order to increase the accessibility of elections to Canadians with cognitive disabilities.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".