Students at Saskatchewan’s universities have until Oct. 9 to cast a special advance ballot that will count in their home riding, wherever that may be.
Elections Canada has the advance polling stations set up in post-secondary institutions across Canada, with one at the University of Regina and two at the University of Saskatchewan.
The U of R polling station has been seeing a lot of traffic since polls opened on Oct. 5. One volunteer said they had 300 students pass through on Monday alone.
Chris Kopytko from Weyburn, Sask., is one of the students who has already voted.
“I’m in geology so I, of course, voted for whoever’s going to help my industry and help my education, so that’s what I based my voting on,” he said.
Kopytko is looking to get into mining or another branch of the resource industry once he graduates.
For other students, they’re focused on the here and now.
“Education is so expensive for students and we need to focus on reducing the cost,” Colton Tomczak said.
Tomczak watched the English language leader’s debate Monday night and came out disappointed.
“I think a lot of the people who are running, they’re attacking the other people instead of actually talking about the actual issues that are at hand,” Tomczak said.
He’s not alone. Jasper Watrich also would rather see parties put policy ahead of mudslinging.
“I think honestly people are going to get tuned out with all the cross-talk that happened during the debate. A lot of people raised important issues, a couple people had great zingers, but ultimately a lot of points got drowned out by people talking over each other,” he said.
In addition to volunteers working at the polling station, Elections Canada has student volunteers in the campus halls encouraging their peers to vote.
Luckily, these volunteers seemed to have more luck getting people to vote than Global News had landing interviews between classes.
After all, it’s the middle of midterms for a majority of students. Many of those who declined interviews said they hadn’t had much time to keep up with the election due to studying.
That’s also the reason why Kopytko missed the debate.
“I didn’t watch the debate. It’s midterm season, so I was crushing out some studying,” he said.