“For Elections Canada, I think the message is that they need to up their game,” said Conservative pundit Geoff Norquay in an interview with The Hill Times.
Conservative Ted Opitz won the riding of Etobicoke Centre with a slim margin of 26 votes in the 2011 election.
Former Liberal MP Borys Wrzesnewskyj, who defeated in the riding in the last election, contested last year’s election result and on May 18, the Ontario Superior Court found that voter registration irregularities were serious enough to warrant a byelection in the riding.
It is only the sixth time since 1949 that a Canadian election result has been overturned. Mr. Opitz appealed the decision before the Supreme Court on July 10. The Supreme Court, which was asked to weigh in on whether “technical irregularities” occurred, held an extraordinary summer hearing on Tuesday, but has reserved judgment and has not indicated how it will rule.
“Whatever the decision is, however it lands, I guarantee you that the next federal election in Canada will be run very differently and all of us win,” said Mr. Wrzesnewskyj on CBC’s Power and Politics on July 10.
Mr. Wrzesnewskyj has argued that the errors are serious enough to call the integrity of the election into question.
Mr. Opitz’s lawyer, Kent Thomas, argued that disqualifying 79 voters whose registrations were found to have clerical issues is unreasonably disenfranchising people who in all likelihood would have been qualified to vote.
The two politicians are now awaiting the Supreme Court decision.
“If the court rules in certain directions, you could see pressure for Elections Canada to get more money, to use better systems, and that would have to be accompanied by some legislative tightening of the rules,” said John Duffy, an electoral historian who has volunteered in Liberal campaigns since the 1970s.
But Mr. Norquay said that the rules surrounding voter identification are already clear, and that instead of changing them, they need to be better enforced.
“What seems to have fallen down here on the part of Elections Canada is the implementation of those rules,” Mr. Norquay said.
A number of observers have pointed to Elections Canada recruitment and training of workers as a potential place for improvement.
“You’ve got to look at the training of the people who work at elections. You might have to develop a pool of individuals who are better-trained and have actually mastered the skills,” said Maurizio Bevilacqua, former Liberal MP and now mayor of the city of Vaughan, Ont. When Mr. Bevilacqua won his seat of York North, Ont., in the 1988 general election by a margin of 77 votes, the results were contested due to Elections Canada errors. A byelection was ordered and in 1990 he won the seat by a margin of 7,000 votes.
Mr. Duffy said that Elections Canada has to adapt to the changing realities of politics in Canada. He explained that up until the 1970s, the parties put a lot of effort into the list of electors, and putting partisan people into jobs at local polling stations. While the pendulum has swung away from that practice for some time, it is now returning.
Elections Canada “got used to a world where there were not many partisan volunteers hanging around, with the deputy returning officers would be just ordinary citizens recruited for the day, no partisan affiliation, and a lot of the time, even in the count there would be no one from one or two of the parties that would bother showing up,” Mr. Duffy said.
Jean-Pierre Kingsley, Canada’s former chief electoral officer, pointed out that Elections Canada trains and pays people for the work they do on voting day, and that Canadians have a right to expect that the job is done right. Mr. Kingsley added that many of the workers are recommended by local political parties, and that the training program is well-established and reviewed after elections.
In light of the situation in Etobicoke Centre, the way candidates handle their on-the-ground campaigns on election day will likely change, said Mr. Duffy.
As fewer people now volunteer for political parties than in the past, often candidates can’t spare anyone to scrutineer at a polling station, Mr. Duffy said. He said that these representatives played a critical role in keeping their opponents honest.
“People stopped volunteering for local campaigns, by and large, and so you’ve actually got an understaffed, under-financed voting system,” Mr. Duffy said.
Now parties will likely start ensuring they have a representative by the ballot box again, Mr. Duffy said.
Conservative pundit and strategist Tom Flanagan, who recently worked on Wildrose Leader Danielle Smith’s election campaign in Alberta, has said that if the Supreme Court overturns the 2011 Etobicoke Centre results, the bar could be set too low for contesting an election in court. He said that in that case, campaign managers would start factoring post-ballot-day court challenges into election strategy.
Mr. Duffy called it compliance chill.
“Flanagan notes that implementing strict compliance requirements could create a situation where a party with more funds can apply to overturn elections willy-nilly, and simply grind down opponents with less funds. Potentially, a big chunk of the election result would be left up to a kind of financial attrition process, which would be pretty undemocratic. Tom raises a good point, that a kind of ‘compliance chill’ could set in,” Mr. Duffy said.
“However, the answer is that the right solution is to have proper controls at the front end of the process so that even well-financed post-election attempts to overturn fail because the quality of the inputs is so good that the courts won’t even take a look at overturning it,” Mr. Duffy added.
Canada needs to avoid a precedent where parties come out of an election an engage in “civil war in the courts,” said Mr. Norquay.
“I’m not sure that there’s a lot that you can do to put it into your planning but I do think that, after the fact, people will take the view that, ‘Well, look, if all else fails, we’ll take them to court,’” he said.
At Elections Canada, figuring out what happened in Etobicoke Centre and making sure it doesn’t happen again has shot to the top of the “to do” list, Canada’s Chief Electoral Officer Marc Mayrand told the House of Commons Procedure and House Affairs Committee on May 29 on the Hill.
“A new priority recently came to light with everything that happened in Etobicoke-Centre,” Mr. Mayrand said.
Elections Canada is now reviewing the voter registration process, taking a look at how it protects the integrity of the voting system and trying to figure out solutions for the 2015 general election, Mr. Mayrand explained.
“Whatever a more in-depth examination reveals will determine how we satisfy the need to implement a quality control measure in real time,” Mr. Mayrand said.
At the heart of the Etobicoke Centre case is election-day voter registration, a feature of the Canadian electoral system that is uncommon in other countries, said Mr. Kingsley in an interview with The Hill Times. Many of contested voters in the case are thought to have been able to cast a ballot because someone vouched for them at their polling station, but in some cases, the backing paperwork was filled out incorrectly or was missing entirely.
“It’s such an important feature that it has to be done right to satisfy Canadians,” he said.
Elections Canada needs to strengthen its record-keeping system so that paperwork can be scrutinized after an election if need be, said Mr. Norquay.
Mr. Duffy, a former adviser to former Liberal prime minister Paul Martin and author of the bestselling, Fights of Our Lives: Elections, Leadership and the Making of Canada,said that the permanent voters’ list and the system of having someone vouch for a person’s identity at the polling station have been revealed as potential weaknesses as well by the Etobicoke Centre case.
Elections Canada maintains a permanent list of people eligible to vote in Canada, which has millions names on it, but Mr. Kingsley said that it’s impossible to keep the list completely up-to-date. He said that by allowing voters to register, with the proper identification, on election day, more people are able to exercise their right to vote.
According to Mr. Mayrand, more than 700,000 people were registered to vote on election day in 2011.
But Canadians have to be able to trust that only those who have the right to vote are able to do so, and that’s why the backing paperwork that Elections Canada officials and voters fill out at polling stations is so important, said Mr. Kingsley.
Canadians “have to know that the documentary evidence is exactly as proscribed,” he said.
Mr. Kingsley does not think that the case will result in major changes to the system itself.
“Learning lessons, that’s different from changing the system,” he said.
He added that Elections Canada reviews what happened after every general election and refines its practices for the next time.
Mr. Mayrand put the challenge facing Elections Canada on voting day bluntly when he testified before the House Affairs Committee: “An election lasts one day. We hire 230,000 people and there are no do-overs.”
Elections Canada will be reviewing how it recruits and trains polling station workers in the coming months, Mr. Mayrand told the House Affairs Committee in May.
“We are going to have to find some way of handling this. Implementing quality control measures throughout election day is likely to be expensive. We are going to consider the situation carefully, do our analysis and come up with proposals in due course,” Mr. Mayrand said.
Mr. Duffy said that get-out-the-vote technology used by candidates to mobilize their supporters has become increasingly sophisticated, and that it’s unclear if Elections Canada has been keeping up its enforcement mechanisms to ensure the tool isn’t abused.
“What you’re seeing now is a field where potential abuse, like the abuses that parties might cook up to ‘game’ the system, are playing a bigger role again. I think it’s arguable that Elections Canada’s capacity hasn’t kept up with the ability of the parties to ‘game’ the system,” he said.
Mr. Duffy added that in his experience, the electoral system “has remained remarkably unchanged” since he started volunteering for candidates in Toronto in the 1970s.
It will be a challenge for Elections Canada to prevent anyone who is determined to tamper with the voting system from doing so, said Mr. Norquay.
Mr. Kingsley said that Canada’s electoral system is “based on trust, modified slightly, but with checks and balances throughout the system.”
But Mr. Duffy said it’s possible to be too trusting that everyone is playing by the rules.
“If you still believe that the trust factor is the way to go, that an honour system is really going to work, visit to the trade show portion of a political consulting industry convention, and when you see what these new machines and technologies and software programs can do, you will see that it’s possible to place too much trust in the honour system,” Mr. Duffy said.
“In the hands of an unscrupulous operator, and sometimes there are people like that in campaigns, you can run rings around the system,” Mr. Duffy said.
Original Article
Source: hill times
Author: Jessica Bruno
No comments:
Post a Comment