‘It’s a mess,’ as chaos unfolded in ’17 election
Ahead of the release of a report probing Calgary’s chaotic municipal election day last fall — a vote marred by ballot shortages, long lines at polling stations and huge delays in the reporting of results — new details have emerged about how staff scrambled to respond to “cascading ” problems on Oct. 16 and the fallout since.
A former municipal official responsible for the vote told Postmedia on Thursday that multiple factors, including the highest voter turnout in decades, contributed to the city’s problems on election day.
“It was different factors that all came together at the exact same moment and led to certain things coming out the way they did,” said Paul Denys, who served as the chief presiding returning officer and as the manager of elections and census for the city.
“There’s so many different moving parts and the minute that certain things start coming out of alignment, then it’s a cascading effect.”
A report going to city council’s audit committee next Wednesday is expected to detail what went wrong in the lead up to election day that resulted in problems with everything from the crash of an online search tool intended to allow citizens to look up the address of their polling station to failures in the deployment of ballots across the city.
Ahead of the release of the audit, documents and correspondence obtained by Postmedia in a freedom of information request offer a glimpse at the mindset of city officials as complaints from the public and the media began rolling in on election night.
At 9:48 p.m., just minutes after polls closed late on Oct. 16 amid long lineups and delays caused by ballot shortages, city manager Jeff Fielding emailed his head of information technology, asking what was wrong with the city’s election results website.
“Nothing is going well right now,” Fielding wrote a short time later in an email to his chief financial officer.
By 10:30 p.m., with reporters clamouring for election results and information about what was causing the holdup, officials within the city’s web and IT teams were trading panicked messages:
“It’s a mess. Election office is working with IT on this. They want to post the results to the blog. Not a lot we can do,” wrote an operations manager with the communications and customer service unit.
“Yeah, we as an organization are getting ripped on Twitter and the TV coverage,” responded a colleague.
With servers overwhelmed by the traffic, workers scrambled to manually update results on an alternative web page while vote counting continued late into the night.
“This looks bad for the city as a whole,” wrote one staff member in a debrief note in the early morning hours of Oct. 17.
In the aftermath of a long and difficult election night — and as internal emails showed communications staff bracing for the possibility that there could be a call for a recount — city clerk Laura Kennedy and city solicitor Glenda Cole stepped in front of the cameras and publicly apologized for the city’s failures on election day.
Cole promised the city would get to bottom of what had happened and “do better” next time.
Coun. Evan Woolley said it isn’t acceptable for Calgary to struggle with election issues in this day and age.
“In 2017, why should anyone have to wait?” said Woolley, referring to the queues that were reported around the city on election night. “This is not new. We’ve been delivering on successful elections and we should be constantly improving. It should actually be getting easier every time.”
Woolley said he doesn’t believe the high voter turnout on election day is an excuse for the failures that occurred, particularly when there were ample signs ahead of time that turnout would be significant.
“Not having enough ballots is an unacceptable problem. It’s not even that we didn’t have them, it’s that they weren’t delivered — that’s unacceptable.”
Kennedy has already hinted at solutions the city will seek to implement ahead of the next election, or possibly even before a potential plebiscite is held on the Olympics this fall.
The city clerk has already approached council about the introduction of electronic tabulation machines to speed up the vote count; the city is also seeking to secure access to enumeration rolls and data maintained by Elections Alberta that is believed to be better than the municipality’s trove of voter data.
Whatever else might come out of 2017’s election chaos, at least one former municipal staffer closely involved in the planning of the flawed vote is no longer working for the City of Calgary.
Asked if the city’s election hiccups contributed to his departure from the job in early 2018 after nearly 10 years of working at the city, Denys said he wasn’t at liberty to say either way.
“I contributed to much of the breakdown from the previous election and my every intention was to remain in my role and make sure that anything that wasn’t done properly in the 2017 election would never reoccur.”