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October 08, 2014 - 7:27 AM
VANCOUVER - Registering voters as young as 16 for a B.C. election is one of three major recommendations the province's chief electoral officer has made to law makers.
Keith Archer says in his report to legislators released Tuesday that the voting age would remain at 18 but dropping the registration age would allow electoral officials to work with schools and driver-licensing programs.
He says the lowest voter-registration rates are for people between the ages of 18 and 24.
Archer's recommendations for improving accessibility and efficiency call for a pilot program that would test new voting technologies for the disabled, although he says law makers should move slowly on Internet voting.
District electoral officers should also be able to hold advance voting opportunities for limited hours, because Archer says some rural areas don't have the population to justify a four-day advance polling period.
The document that makes a number of technical changes comes ahead of another proposal for a new voting process that Archer plans to submit to legislators next spring.
News from © The Canadian Press, 2014