“Conservatives just keep ragging the puck on a bill. They have no urgency,” NDP House Leader Nathan Cullen (Skeena-Bulkley Valley, B.C.) told The Hill Times last week.
In response to an Elections Canada report released on April 30, A Review of Compliance with Election Day Registration and Voting Process Rules, Prime Minister Stephen Harper (Calgary Southwest, Alta.) and Minister of State for Democratic Reform Tim Uppal (Edmonton-Sherwood Park, Alta.) both said the government would be bringing in legislation soon.
“An independent audit highlighted widespread errors in Elections Canada’s operations during the last election. We will bring forward amendments to the law in the not too distant future,” Mr. Uppal said in the House on May 2.
Former British Columbia chief electoral officer Harry Neufeld conducted the compliance review and said in his report that 114,693 Canadians’ votes from the 2011 general election are “in question” because Elections Canada employees did not follow proper voting day procedures in 165,000 cases. That’s 0.9 per cent of all votes cast on election day, and an average of 372 “irregularities” per riding.
Seven MPs won their ridings with less than 372 votes in the last election campaign, including Conservatives Jay Aspin (Nipissing-Timiskaming, Ont.), Ryan Leef (Yukon), former MP Peter Penashue (Labrador, Nfld.), Lawrence Toet (Elmwood-Transcona, Man.) and Ted Opitz (Etobicoke-Centre, Ont.); Liberal MP Kevin Lamoureux (Winnipeg North, Man.) and NDP MP François Lapointe (Montmagny-L’Islet-Kamouraska-Riviere-du-Loup, Que.).
Elections Canada commissioned the report after former Liberal MP Borys Wrzesnewskyj challenged his election results in Etobicoke-Centre after losing to Mr. Opitz by 26 votes. Mr. Wrzesnewskyj won his case in Ontario Superior Court when Justice Thomas Lederer found 79 instances of “irregular” votes from a sample of 10 polling stations and declared the election result “null and void” because the irregular votes exceeded the 26 that Mr. Opitz won by.
Mr. Opitz immediately appealed to the Supreme Court which overruled Justice Lederer’s decision. In a split decision, the Supreme Court said that “only votes cast by persons not entitled to vote are invalid” and Mr. Opitz kept his seat.
Green Party Leader Elizabeth May (Saanich-Gulf Islands, B.C.) said the allegations are “serious” and that it’s incumbent on Mr. Harper to call an inquiry to find out what exactly happened, not only with Etobicoke-Centre, but also in Guelph, Ont., with robocalls and alleged voter suppression.
“Given that this appears to us to be new, and given that we’re dealing with a pattern of efforts at election suppression that benefit the Conservatives, whether they organized it knowledgeably or not, whether they knew about it, or whether it’s rogue workers who support Conservatives, I’m not making allegations to who organized it, but there certainly is cause for concern and if I were Stephen Harper, I’d be calling a full inquiry into the robocalls scandal, into the Elections Canada report so that everyone would know he not only didn’t know about it, and he doesn’t approve of it,” she told The Hill Times.
In response to a question from NDP MP David Christopherson (Hamilton Centre, Ont.) asking “Why are the Conservatives afraid of a chief electoral officer with real pull?”
Mr. Harper replied: “We have no such fear. In fact, we have committed to come through with amendments to do precisely that. The fact of the matter is, it is only in the last few weeks that Elections Canada has made its own recommendations in this regard. We are looking specifically at those recommendations, and as the government has indicated, we will be bringing forward amendments to the law in the not too distant future.”
Mr. Neufeld led the compliance review, first by reexamining the 10 polls studied in Etobicoke-Centre and in 1,000 other random polls across the country. An audit of the voting day procedures during the three byelections held in November 2012 of 50 random polls also took place as part of the review. The report found that the two major problems were the complexity of the rules around election day procedures, and the lack of training for the more than 200,000 temporary Elections Canada employees who administer registration of voters on election day.
In the last election, 757,539 people had to register to vote when they got to their polling station, which is where most of the procedural errors occurred.
Elections officers only receive one approximately three-hour training session before helping to administer a federal election. While rules are spelled out in manuals, often they are maintained in a legal way and can be difficult for election officers to understand, Mr. Neufeld’s report said. Further, the instructions to elections officers are not user-friendly. This is coupled with the arduous working conditions elections officers face, including working 14 to 16 hour days for close to or less than minimum wages in various provinces, and because all voting “must halt at a polling station if an election officer is absent permits no meal or other breaks.”
Aside from logistical issues, there are legislative issues, the report said. Because the Canadian system is based on electoral districts and voters must vote in a specified polling division based on where they live, it makes it difficult to register voters when they change addresses. In the 308 ridings in Canada, there were 64,572 polling divisions with an average of 210 polling stations per riding. There were an average of 382 registered voters per polling station in the last election campaign.
Approximately 85 per cent of Canadians who vote on election day do so “regularly,” meaning they have registered in advance and are at the correct polling station with the correct ID to prove age, citizenship, and address. The remaining 15 per cent must register on election day (as is their right) and sometimes do not have the correct identification. Elections Canada officers then have to register them manually and provide registration certificates that often are not completed or not returned after the election or are recorded improperly on a “correction certificate.”
Mr. Neufeld’s audit found that many elections officers used correction certificates when a registration was necessary for people who were already on the registration list, but had moved into a different riding. Legally, they are required to re-register the voter and use the correction certificate only if there is a correction such as a misspelled name or misspelled street address. On top of this, elections officers have to deal with political partisan scrutineers who are allowed to ask for and receive a list of all the people who have voted every half hour. This is all done by paper and elections officers do not have access to a database of registered electors in real time.
“Clearly the model is antique,” the report said. “Indications of widespread and serious procedural errors in Etobicoke Centre and the national audit signal unmistakably that an overhaul is urgently required.”
Mr. Neufeld made 12 recommendations all of which Elections Canada accepted, including moving to the province of New Brunswick’s model of administering elections. The New Brunswick model eliminates specific polling stations and moves to a system where electors simply “check in” with an election officer who has access to a database of registered voters in real time to prove their eligibility. Once it’s established they’re able to vote, voters receive a token which they exchange for a ballot and they can vote at any available station not necessarily at a specific polling number. Additionally, the ballots are “automated scanner-tabulated,” which means the votes are counted electronically and immediately, providing “substantial efficiency gains.”
In response, Chief Electoral Officer Marc Mayrand said in the report, “While a new voting services model would address fundamental compliance issues by 2019, we agree with Mr. Neufeld that improvements to existing programs are required immediately for the 2015 election, even though we expect these improvements will reduce, but not in themselves resolve, the non-compliance problem.”
Other recommendations include better training for specific tasks so that elections officers are only doing one thing, for example only registering new voters, improving working conditions, simplifying instruction manuals and conducting regular audits on the voting day procedures.
Mr. Neufeld noted in his report that in order “to substantially improve rates of compliance with election day registration and voting procedures in the 2015 general election compels modest amendments to the Canada Elections Act. To allow time for implementation, such amendments should be passed into law no later than spring 2014.
Mr. Cullen said he doesn’t have high hopes that the bill be passed in time, even if the government does introduce it soon.
“I think we might see legislation, but then they’ll take long enough in the process to make sure that it doesn’t pass in time for Elections Canada to use it. And they’ll say, ‘You know the House of Commons is a tricky place,’ or ‘Yeah, the opposition is delaying it,’” Mr. Cullen told The Hill Times.
Meanwhile, Mr. Cullen said he’s noted at the Procedure and House Affairs Committee that the report needs to be studied.
Liberal House Leader Dominic LeBlanc (Beauséjour, N.B.) said he doesn’t believe the committee will get to the report before the House recesses for the summer in June because it’s currently working through electoral boundary commission reports that will add 30 seats to the House of Commons. He said it’s important for the committee to review the report but likely won’t get to it until the late fall. The House is scheduled to adjourn on June 21.
“The Elections Canada document we saw last week identified a very alarming number of irregularities and compliance problems. Our concern has always been that Elections Canada will have their budget cut by the government,” he said. “I don’t have any faith that they’re going to give Elections Canada the resources they need. If they’re looking at a better model from my province that may assist, then that would be something of interest to us at the Procedure and House Affairs Committee.”
Original Article
Source: hilltimes.com
Author: BEA VONGDOUANGCHANH
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