Pandemic election on horizon
Chief Electoral Officer Bruce Chaulk and his staff at Elections NL are facing a daunting task: how do you hold a provincial election during a pandemic?
The Liberal party leadership race is due to conclude on Aug. 4. Legislation dictates an election must be held within a year after a new premier is sworn in, barring any legislative change. With a vaccine for the coronavirus still in the distant future, Newfoundland and Labrador will vote under some level of the public health emergency.
“An election is like being a wedding planner. You have 40 weddings all being held on the same day and you don’t know how many people are going to show up,” Chaulk said.
Now, those weddings will have the extra stress of some degree of restrictions on the public due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
There are already three warehouses full of election material at the Elections NL offices ready to go at the drop of the writ.
“A lot of this will depend on the alert level we’re at, at the point in time.”
“One of the things that we plan to do is we’re going to increase the number of polling locations. Previously, we might have had, say, at Macdonald Drive Junior High, we might have had eight regular polls there on polling day with half their gym. We’d probably say now that we’d like the full gym and put the same eight in there so we could spread people out,” Chaulk said.
With increased polling sites comes increased cost to rent space. If public health measures are particularly restrictive at the time of the election, Chaulk says, he has to consider whether buying personal protective equipment for voters is on the laundry list of election preparations.
“We’re not quite sure how many masks we’re going to need yet. I don’t know what level we’re going to be under. There’s a lot of difference between ordering 4,000 masks and ordering 400,000 masks,” he said.
Masks are one thing, but Chaulk will have to work out whether every individual voter will need their own pencil to cast their ballot, if sanitizing a pencil after each voter marks a ballot isn’t efficient.
The 2019 election cost the province $4.86 million.
MAIL-IN DEMOCRACY
One way to avoid crowds at the polls will be the use of special or mail-in ballots.
“I suspect more people will want to vote by mail,” said Chaulk.
In the 2019 general election, there were 9,313 special ballots cast out of 214,807 total votes cast. The rules around special ballots changed as a result of a 2017 Supreme Court decision stemming from the election of Clyde Jackman in the district of Burin-placentia West. Justice Gillian Butler ruled that Jackman’s opponent,
Julie Mitchell, of the New Democratic Party, would have won the seat if the special ballots were not counted. Previously, special ballots could be cast up to four weeks ahead of the start of an election campaign. Because of the ruling, the window to receive and process such ballots is greatly reduced. In 2019, electors had 15 days to sign up for a special ballot, with the deadline to return the ballots to Elections NL three days after registration closed.
“The way we look at our electoral system is, our electoral system is based on a supervised vote. The special ballot or the mail-in ballot is an unsupervised vote,” Chaulk said.
“You have to make sure you’re sending the ballot to the person you ought to send it to. There’s more verification of who’s on the other end of getting that envelope. It’s more time consuming from our perspective, as well.”
Chaulk says there have always been special ballots that either were never returned or were delivered after the official count was complete. In 2019, there were 43 ballots returned after the official count, with 142 additional special ballots not returned to Elections NL at all.
Advance polling days could also present a chance to spread out voting and prevent mass gatherings of voters. There were 21,291 votes cast at a single advance polling day in 2019. Chaulk says it may be worth looking at expanding advance polling, but one must be conscious of unintended consequences.
“Every small change has a ripple effect,” he said.
ELECTRONIC VOTING NOT AN OPTION
The process for voting inperson during a pandemic or applying for and submitting special ballots is the only process available in the province.
Chaulk says there is no ability to use electronic voting in the province. He says it’s more a question for the 2023 or 2027 general elections.
Caitlin Urquhart, co-chair of the Citizens’ Assembly for Stronger Elections, says electronic voting is worth examining, but there are plenty of issues to work out before it’s introduced.
“There are concerns about susceptibility of any form of electronic voting to fraud or to corruption or to error in code that causes incorrect outcomes. Also, you have all this voter data that’s collected by this program,” she said.
“It’s certainly a possible way to increase accessibility.”
Urquhart says special ballots also present a challenge for newcomers to the political fold.
“A mail-in ballot actually shortens the campaign period. As soon as someone receives the ballot, they may choose to vote at that point. The election campaign may have just started. New entrants into the campaign likely haven’t had the opportunity to get their campaigns off the ground,” Urquhart said.
“That’s a challenge for all new entrants. Especially at this time (when) we’re talking about diversity, I think that’s an important thing to note.”