Voters list for civic election Ottawa’s ‘worst’ in decades

When Donna Robillard picked up her mail on Monday, she was happy to find her voter notification letter, telling her when and where she can vote in this month’s municipal election.

She was less pleased about the second one in her Greely mailbox.

It was for her ex-husband Yvon Henry Robillard, who died almost two years ago. They divorced in the 1990s and Robillard said this is the first election she’s received voting information for him in about two decades. “My first thought was, ‘Oh my God. Somebody screwed up,’ ” Robillard said.

Elections manager Catherine Bergeron said she doesn’t doubt the mixup, although she hasn’t looked into Robillard’s case specifically.

“This has been an extraordinary year for the voters list,” said Bergeron, who has been involved in elections since the 1980s. “This has to be, in my opinion, the worst voters list we’ve had.

“There are people on the list who have been deceased for 20 years, and they’re all of a sudden back on the list. There are people who their children haven’t been living in the house for 10 years and they’re back on the list.”

The city, like all Ontario municipalities, gets a preliminary voters list from the Municipal Property Assessment Corporation. The Ontario not-for-profit corporation, which provides property assessments, is required under Ontario’s Municipal Elections Act to give municipalities preliminary lists during election years.

The city then does some of its own checking before using it to send out notifications, Bergeron said. Her staff make sure no one under 18 is on the list or on it multiple times, for example.

“We made 32,000 changes that we saw were wrong, which to me is a terrible list from the Municipal Property Assessment Corporation,” she said, adding that’s 10,000 more changes than were made for the 2010 election, and that the city continues to receive a lot of calls about errors.

Bergeron said she hasn’t had time to talk to MPAC about the problems yet and that those discussions usually happen after elections.

Arthur Anderson, MPAC director of municipal relations, said he hadn’t heard about a higher number of concerns from Ottawa or any other municipality this year.

“We want to make sure the information we provide to municipalities is up to date, as accurate as possible,” he said, adding that he would be speaking with Bergeron.

This year, he said, “a number of improvements” have been made to the way preliminary elector information is collected, including taking updated information from Elections Ontario, a website where people can update their information, the national register of electors collected at tax time, and provincial death information from the past seven or eight years.

After the first preliminary list provided in the summer, MPAC hands over another one in September in case people have moved, he said.

When municipalities make corrections, they send them to MPAC after the election so it starts the next election with the most upto-date list, Anderson said.

Anderson looked up Robillard’s

Either the change never came to us or the change wasn’t made.

case and found her ex-husband shows up in MPAC’s records as a tenant on her property. He said the information was that way for the 2006 and 2010 municipal elections.

“He would have received a voter information card ... unless the city had reason to take him off,” Anderson said. “Either the change never came to us or the change wasn’t made.”

But Robillard said her ex-husband lived elsewhere in Ottawa for decades and she didn’t receive voter information for him during that period. “I haven’t had anything for him for years,” said Robillard, a 61-year-old retiree.

Robillard’s neighbour, Diane Matte, said she received a voter notification this year for her nephew who hasn’t lived at her address since the mid-1990s when he went to high school in the area. Now 35, he lives outside of Ottawa, Matte said.

Matte received a voter notification for him more than a decade ago, she said, but his address was updated. Until a few days ago, Matte said, she hadn’t received another notification for him.

She said she’s worried about other wrong addresses. “I know that you’re supposed to phone if you don’t receive (a voter notification), but how many people actually do that? Are they going to go ahead and vote? Where are they going to go to vote?”

“I want to know how this happened. That’s my biggest thing,” she said.

Bergeron said she’s not concerned mix-ups will cause people to vote in the wrong wards because an election worker at the polls would check current address, correcting any location errors.

“You’ve got to change your information before you vote, even if that puts you in a different ward,” she said. “The voter is ultimately responsible.”