The overturn on appeal of the 2011 Etobicoke Centre federal election (originally won by 26 votes by Conservative Ted Opitz) caught everyone by surprise, elections officials not least. It adds another layer to problems besetting the Canadian elections process already troubled by allegations of wrongdoing in the Robocall affair.
Ontario Justice Thomas Lederer had been skeptical that an elections process involving more than 100,000 part-time polling officials across Canada could escape without a significant number of clerical errors. He said in his decision that the case presents “a true conundrum (which) arises in that making it too easy to set aside the results of an election may also lead to a loss of confidence in the process. Mistakes in the records are inevitable.”
But Justice Lederer found enough serious blunders, mainly in the registration and vouching process for electors not on the list, that on balance of probability he was forced to disallow 79 votes cast, thus exceeding the plurality of 26 votes in the election. That was the ‘magic number’ which led him to rule the election null and void.
When a judge uses the word ‘conundrum’ five times in a decision, it suggests that the law may be leading him somewhere his judgement tells him he’d rather not go. But he is bound by the logic of the statutes and the case law.
No matter what happens in the Supreme Court if the government chooses to take the battle to that level (the deadline for appealing to the Supreme Court is end-of-day Monday), the decision has serious implications for the running of elections. The judgement highlights deficiencies in recruitment and training which are systemic. Returning Officers dread a close result because they are too close to the system not to see the minefields. The question is what to do about it, and that’s something that politicians don’t seem to want to come to grips with. The attitude is ‘You’re the Chief Electoral Officer, you fix it’.
Things have gone a little beyond that. Justice Lederer made the trenchant comment: “This is just one of so many areas where our society is changing more quickly than the ability of our systems to keep up.”
Precisely. And that can’t really be fixed administratively, only by legislated adjustments to the system. The judge was not there to prescribe remedies, but remedies should be a subject for more public discussion than they tend to get.
On-line voting is a radical solution probably not in the cards for a while, especially as it’s now realized that political hacktivity and on-line skulduggery are a clear and present danger. Preliminary investigations in one province were reportedly ended recently on the – perfectly sensible – grounds that a minority government is not the time or place for experiments when you need a constant state of readiness. However, elections management software has had a very unhappy history provincially and with the amount of security and verification measures now known to be needed, plus the sheer physical geography to be covered, any serious pilot project could wind up looking at mission-and-budget creep of close to F-35 proportions.
Most returning offices cope perfectly well with the operating environment. It is the extremes – inner-city and remote/northern – that really tax the system – but Etobicoke Centre was a ‘perfectly normal’ riding with an outlier result.
Here are a few remedies to mull over. They’re all patches, but the system was built from patches:
Re-extend the writ period. We are now accustomed to a short 28-day writ. Extending the writ to (say) 45 days would give the election agencies time to get systems functional and recruit and train more thoroughly.
Revisit the registration system thoroughly. Polling-day registration is shown to be risky, though it’s worth noting that the ‘magic number’ was accounted for in a single poll – 426 – where no registration officer was assigned. Reinforcing pre-election-day registration capacity should be looked at hard. Think about re-introducing pre-writ enumeration in urban areas.
Extend poll officials’ training from 2.5 hours to half a day. This will at least allow for complexities like registration to be covered more intensely, without slighting training for the 99+% of situations that are ‘normal’.
Raise the pay of polling-day officials. At present, returning officers are required to have a 30% standby reserve. In an inner-city riding, that’s 900 people to be trained before election day. $200 and training pay may not be worth getting out of bed for on a rainy day, but $300 and increased training pay might. We are in a time of austerity, but it may be the price of democracy because you sure can’t do it without these folks.
Partially introduce automatic ballot tabulators (not voting machines), perhaps only in the very dense urban ridings. The City of Toronto uses them. They were used experimentally in some polls in the last Ontario election, and performed impressively. They’re still too expensive to be put everywhere across the country but they could take pressure off the system where it’s most intense.
Some relief of pressure is needed because the elections machinery is at risk of collapse.
Original Article
Source: ipolitics
Author: Eric Morse
Ontario Justice Thomas Lederer had been skeptical that an elections process involving more than 100,000 part-time polling officials across Canada could escape without a significant number of clerical errors. He said in his decision that the case presents “a true conundrum (which) arises in that making it too easy to set aside the results of an election may also lead to a loss of confidence in the process. Mistakes in the records are inevitable.”
But Justice Lederer found enough serious blunders, mainly in the registration and vouching process for electors not on the list, that on balance of probability he was forced to disallow 79 votes cast, thus exceeding the plurality of 26 votes in the election. That was the ‘magic number’ which led him to rule the election null and void.
When a judge uses the word ‘conundrum’ five times in a decision, it suggests that the law may be leading him somewhere his judgement tells him he’d rather not go. But he is bound by the logic of the statutes and the case law.
No matter what happens in the Supreme Court if the government chooses to take the battle to that level (the deadline for appealing to the Supreme Court is end-of-day Monday), the decision has serious implications for the running of elections. The judgement highlights deficiencies in recruitment and training which are systemic. Returning Officers dread a close result because they are too close to the system not to see the minefields. The question is what to do about it, and that’s something that politicians don’t seem to want to come to grips with. The attitude is ‘You’re the Chief Electoral Officer, you fix it’.
Things have gone a little beyond that. Justice Lederer made the trenchant comment: “This is just one of so many areas where our society is changing more quickly than the ability of our systems to keep up.”
Precisely. And that can’t really be fixed administratively, only by legislated adjustments to the system. The judge was not there to prescribe remedies, but remedies should be a subject for more public discussion than they tend to get.
On-line voting is a radical solution probably not in the cards for a while, especially as it’s now realized that political hacktivity and on-line skulduggery are a clear and present danger. Preliminary investigations in one province were reportedly ended recently on the – perfectly sensible – grounds that a minority government is not the time or place for experiments when you need a constant state of readiness. However, elections management software has had a very unhappy history provincially and with the amount of security and verification measures now known to be needed, plus the sheer physical geography to be covered, any serious pilot project could wind up looking at mission-and-budget creep of close to F-35 proportions.
Most returning offices cope perfectly well with the operating environment. It is the extremes – inner-city and remote/northern – that really tax the system – but Etobicoke Centre was a ‘perfectly normal’ riding with an outlier result.
Here are a few remedies to mull over. They’re all patches, but the system was built from patches:
Re-extend the writ period. We are now accustomed to a short 28-day writ. Extending the writ to (say) 45 days would give the election agencies time to get systems functional and recruit and train more thoroughly.
Revisit the registration system thoroughly. Polling-day registration is shown to be risky, though it’s worth noting that the ‘magic number’ was accounted for in a single poll – 426 – where no registration officer was assigned. Reinforcing pre-election-day registration capacity should be looked at hard. Think about re-introducing pre-writ enumeration in urban areas.
Extend poll officials’ training from 2.5 hours to half a day. This will at least allow for complexities like registration to be covered more intensely, without slighting training for the 99+% of situations that are ‘normal’.
Raise the pay of polling-day officials. At present, returning officers are required to have a 30% standby reserve. In an inner-city riding, that’s 900 people to be trained before election day. $200 and training pay may not be worth getting out of bed for on a rainy day, but $300 and increased training pay might. We are in a time of austerity, but it may be the price of democracy because you sure can’t do it without these folks.
Partially introduce automatic ballot tabulators (not voting machines), perhaps only in the very dense urban ridings. The City of Toronto uses them. They were used experimentally in some polls in the last Ontario election, and performed impressively. They’re still too expensive to be put everywhere across the country but they could take pressure off the system where it’s most intense.
Some relief of pressure is needed because the elections machinery is at risk of collapse.
Original Article
Source: ipolitics
Author: Eric Morse
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