City of Helsinki's multilingual video encourages immigrants to vote in municipal elections

The video explains the tasks and decision-making of the municipalities, or which things you can influence through voting. It also tells who are entitled to vote in the elections. The video explains when and where it is possible to vote and it contains examples of how to act at the polling station.  The language versions are Finnish, English, Russian, Estonian, Somali, Arabic and Farsi.

The video has been planned and produced in cooperation between the immigration information service of the Participation and Citizen Information unit and the Helsinki Channel. "We want to encourage immigrants to participate and make a difference. It is important that everyone's voice is heard when decisions that affect us all are made", says Information Director Anne Nissinen.

In Helsinki, the voter turnout among foreign citizens in the 2012 municipal elections was 21 per cent, which was clearly lower than the voter turnout of the entire population at 57.4 per cent. In Helsinki, the figure is still a little higher than in other parts of Finland; in the whole Finland, only 19.6 per cent of the foreign citizens who were entitled to vote voted in the previous municipal elections.

According a survey by TNS Gallup, the main reason for not voting was that the foreign citizens did not know about their right to vote in the Finnish municipal elections. Finnish voting procedures can also confuse people who are not used to them. The new video strives to address these problems in particular. The aim of the video is to motivate the immigrants to use their right to vote by talking about the right to vote and describing the voting process.

Link to the videos: http://www.helsinkikanava.fi/www/kanava/fi/sarjat/sarja?id=303