Potentially, yes. The commission would take a lead on that kind of awareness raising nationally, but we would work closely in partnership with the electoral registration officers across Scotland, who have links into their communities. It would be very much a partnership approach. We could run a grand advertising campaign, but we are trying to reach 55,000 or 60,000 people who are dotted around the country, so it would not be cost effective to run big nationwide advertising campaigns.
I watched with interest the evidence that you heard on that a couple of weeks ago. Since then, I have spoken to Lorna Gledhill from the Scottish Refugee Council about how we can work together. There are people who are already on the ground working with such communities, so there is no point in our replicating the good work that they are doing. We can work in partnership.
In the past, we have developed education resources on not just how to register and vote but what an elected politician is and what parties are. We are doing that work anyway in relation to political literacy for 16 and 17-year-olds in schools. In the past, we had a big resource that electoral registration officers and youth workers used called the democracy cookbook, which had plain English information about the institutions as well as activities such as build your own politician. Those were fun activities to allow people to think about democracy and what it means. We are looking at developing some of that work for young people, and that can perhaps be transferred to different audiences by using different examples and issues.
As I said, there will be a partnership approach, because we will rely on the expertise and knowledge of people who work with those communities. We can bring the expertise on democracy and voting, but we need the expertise of people who work in those communities and who understand the needs and language barriers. We already translate our forms into about 25 languages, but that might change. I have been looking at some of the census data from 2011 and it looks as though the biggest group that will be enfranchised will be Americans, but there will also be large numbers of Iraqis and Chinese people, so we probably need to think about more translated materials.