Bring our voting system into the 21st century

On Oct. 19, I spent more than 14 hours as an unpaid scrutineer for a candidate in Esquimalt-Saanich-Sooke. The experience showed me how badly we need to update the process of casting and counting ballots.

Inside the polling station, which had 10 separate polls, things went relatively smoothly throughout the day. Voters were greeted and directed politely and efficiently. Lineups were minimal and spasmodic: One neighbourhood was out in force between 7:45 a.m. and 8:45 a.m., and that was the most persistent queue of the day. Identification problems were generally resolved quickly at a special desk. But there were some problems. Only two of the 10 stations had a separate table for the cardboard polling “booth.” The other eight were jammed at the end of the two-person deputy returning officers’ table. That was unsatisfactory.

Pencils in the booths were substandard; one table had a bag of shavings from the continuous sharpening and breaking. One DRO could see no problem with a blunt pencil until he was countermanded.

There was an anomaly with dogs: small ones, even loose, were allowed in; large ones on leashes were kept outside by one of the workers or volunteers.

Handicapped voters were accompanied through the process by the returning officer, not their helpers. This might have been a problem for some. It certainly was elsewhere, as the wife of a blind friend was not allowed to direct him as in the past.

Not too much to worry about overall, perhaps you are thinking, but major problems arose when the doors closed at 7 p.m.

By this time, the number of scrutineers had risen to 11 for four of the five candidates. Because I was the most experienced (more than 40 years), I became a self-appointed floating scrutineer and conversed frequently with the other 10. Some of the DROs got on with the paperwork relatively quickly. Others struggled from the outset, and problems surfaced immediately.

About half of the polls could not reconcile the number of ballot stubs and/or the number of unused ballots with the number of registered voters. In a few cases, it took three counts to get it right. The average count per poll was less than 300.

Some officials were still reading their instructions, on large spread-out sheets, some 20 minutes on.

It took a long time to unfold the ballots and to keep them stacked as the paper began to “refold.”

One official was completely stunned for nearly 30 minutes. She realized she could not distinguish between the black lines she had put through or under voters’ names and those lines that were pre-printed on the register for the advanced voters in that poll. Finally, she had to look at the back of each page for her own imprint. This count, the longest, took almost two hours.

Another official insisted on reading aloud the party’s name (in hard-toread small print) instead of the candidate’s name, which was above in large print. He was the only one to do it this way.

Not one count was completed satisfactorily and correctly in less than 50 minutes. The average was about an hour and 20 minutes, and the longest was an hour and 55 minutes.

By the time all the scrutineers got the results from all 10 polls, it was 9:05 and the winner of the riding had already been declared “elected.” Presumably, some of the vote-counters elsewhere did it more expeditiously than the ones we witnessed.

This is 2015 and yet it was the longest count of small numbers that I have ever experienced. It left me shaking my head, thinking that some kind of electronic process, such as the one used by Saanich, would expedite the process.

Counted this way, the ballots are not handled by the returning officer after marking, are still intact and could be re-counted if necessary.

I’m grateful to live in a democracy where we can vote without fear of intimidation or coercion, but our voting process is very antiquated. It needs to be brought into the 21st century with technology and procedures that streamline the process and make it less error-prone.