The vote that gave Alison Redford’s Progressive Conservatives 61 seats in the 87-seat legislature and drew the highest voter turnout in 19 years ran concurrently with a senate nominee election that cost taxpayers an additional $2.1 million, according to reports on the two elections released Friday.
By comparison, the 2008 election cost $9.9 million and there was no senate election that year.
The enumeration or listing of voters cost a further $6.5 million — up 35 per cent from 2004 — for a total election cost of $22.2 million. Not counting the enumeration expense, it cost $5.57 per listed elector compared to $3.88 in 2008.
The riding that staged the most costly vote was Calgary-Northern Hills, which racked up a $148,714 tab, including a provincial-high $15,284 for election clerk expenses.
Fees and associated costs for Alberta’s 16,000 election officers made up 80 per cent of the election budget.
Elections Alberta spokesman Drew Westwater said the cost of elections increase every four years due to increased voter population and the cost of inflation on election materials, supplies, and election staff.
“The cost of elections is determined by voter population primarily and the type of voting system being used in any jurisdiction,” Westwater explained in an email.
He noted Alberta uses a manual paper ballot voting system.
The province is in the process of amending election legislation to enable the use of information collected for income tax purposes to form the basis of enumeration lists.
Justice Minister Jonathan Denis has said the change included in Bill 7, the Election Accountability Amendment Act, could save the province millions in enumeration costs. The bill is expected to pass next week.
Chief electoral officer O. Brian Fjeldheim said in his report that it has been increasingly difficult to contact voters because of their busy schedules and living environments.
Enumerators have difficulty entering condos, apartments and gated communities even though the law requires them to be granted access.
He also expressed concern about the difficulties in retaining 5,500 enumerators, adding that 845 enumerators left the job because of difficulties contacting voters, lengthy driving times in rural areas and competing personal priorities.
But during the election, the biggest challenge was co-ordinating the provincial and senate votes simultaneously, he said.
“Conducting two parallel elections in one day is a complex undertaking,” he said. “The accurate, timely count of two sets of ballots was identified by election officers as the biggest challenge related to the 2012 elections.”
There were other challenges, too, he said.
One polling station was flooded and voters had to be directed to an alternate location, and a suspicious package resulted in temporary closure of a road to another polling station.
“The package was identified as a bag of refuse and voting continued following a brief interruption,” Fjeldheim said in his report.
The chief electoral officer said the majority of complaints during the election related to “unwanted calls” received via automated telephone messaging services.
“Many recipients of the ‘robo-calls’ contacted Elections Alberta to complain about the time that calls were received, the frequency of the calls, and the fact that the caller’s name and contact information were not always supplied,” he said in his report. “Recipients of the unwanted calls were particularly incensed when they continued to receive calls after contacting the sponsor of the call and asking to have their names removed from the calling list.”
Fjeldheim said some campaign offices complained they were the target of “negative messaging” or that the calls erroneously implicated them as being behind the calls.
The new legislation being debated in the legislature will address that.
Bill 7 will require election campaign callers to identify themselves and say on whose behalf they are calling. The callers will be required to provide contact information and they are forbidden from blocking their number from call-display phones.
Original Article
Source: calgary herald
Author: Darcy Henton
No comments:
Post a Comment