Electoral participation among Canadian voters with intellectual disabilities
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Canada is one of the few countries in the world that has no legal restriction on voting due to cognitive impairment. In fact, recent legal changes have technically increased the accessibility of polling locations. However, despite this inclusive legislation, individuals with intellectual disabilities vote at lower rates than individuals without disabilities and individuals with other disabilities. Currently, there are no qualitative studies within Canada that speak to individuals with intellectual disabilities that examines voting among this population. This qualitative descriptive thesis conducted within the pragmatic paradigm aims to explore what voting means to individuals with intellectual disabilities and what barriers and facilitators they experience during the voting process. 12 individuals with intellectual disabilities were recruited through two community organizations, Community Living Kingston and District and the Special Olympics. Semi-structured interviews were conducted and revealed three findings: 1) individuals with intellectual disabilities experienced mixed voting experiences, 2) the most commonly cited barrier was informational, and 3) the most commonly cited facilitator was the support they received from election volunteers on voting day. Regarding the first finding, while most participants voted, remembered voting, and generally felt positively about voting, some participants felt negatively about voting or were not interested in voting. Regarding the second finding, participants felt that they lacked several types of information necessary to cast votes, including knowing who to vote for and the voting process itself. Regarding the third finding, participants felt that the volunteers who worked at the voting locations were very helpful and noted that the volunteers were nice and effective. Moving forward, Elections Canada and community organizations should continue to collaborate to implement comprehensive accessibility measures that go beyond addressing physical barriers but also include informational and attitudinal barriers.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.015 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 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 source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), 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".