Evidence of meeting #15 for Procedure and House Affairs in the 40th Parliament, 2nd session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was returns.
A recording is available from Parliament.
Chief Electoral Officer, Office of the Chief Electoral Officer
Are you referring to the order in which their returns were processed?
Chief Electoral Officer, Office of the Chief Electoral Officer
No, not really.
Bloc
Claude DeBellefeuille Bloc Beauharnois—Salaberry, QC
Can we find out if we were among the first ten?
Chief Electoral Officer, Office of the Chief Electoral Officer
Results are posted as the returns are processed. As soon as final reimbursements have been issued, the results are posted within 24 or 48 hours. This is not done in any particular order, because a number of variables can come into play.
Bloc
Conservative
Liberal
Rodger Cuzner Liberal Cape Breton—Canso, NS
Thank you very much. Thank you to the witnesses. I'll certainly look forward to the full evaluation when it is presented at the end of the month.
Some of the questions that have been asked, and certainly Libby's, were concerns I share as well, and some of the recommendations you are putting forward, as Harold mentioned...the advance polls are something we've had in our constituency as well. I'm from a primarily rural area. We don't have the numbers, but we do have the windshield time to justify additional advance polls, and some people in rural communities really don't have access to public transportation. So that really should be a factor in attempts to better accommodate voters.
I've got two questions here. The first concerns the posting of expenses and contributors. The website is fairly friendly, and I've been on the website a couple of times. It's not too hard to navigate, but I'm wondering what the protocol is with regard to the posting of expenses and claims. I don't even know if mine have been posted yet, and I know they have been submitted for some time. Can you give me some rationale as to when those things are posted?
And could you give me a general overview? I remember the voters list in 2004 was a nightmare. It was a little bit better in 2006. So could you give me some general comments on where you think you're going with the voters list? Is it getting better each time? Is there some way you can measure the accuracy of the voters list? Is there something you guys do with that?
Those are my questions: the posting of expenses and revenues, and the voters list.
Chief Electoral Officer, Office of the Chief Electoral Officer
In terms of posting financial returns—I presume we're talking about candidates' returns—these are posted as received, first. So before any review, as we receive them, they are posted as submitted. That should take place...again, there's a bit of a delay there, but we aim to have them posted within 72 hours. So within three days of receiving returns, they are posted as submitted.
What may be somewhat confusing at times is that eventually the returns will be reposted as reviewed. Our service standard is six months, and in many cases it may take six months for the returns to be posted as final. In other cases it may take much longer if there are issues around the return itself.
Liberal
Chief Electoral Officer, Office of the Chief Electoral Officer
They're not final. The first posting is as submitted by the candidate, the official agent.
Chief Electoral Officer, Office of the Chief Electoral Officer
Later on, there will be a new version that will say “as reviewed”. That means it has been audited, approved, and certified.
Chief Electoral Officer, Office of the Chief Electoral Officer
Again, there are easily six months between the two versions.
In terms of voters lists, again, right now we have various methodologies to assess the quality of the lists. We basically have two measures. One is the coverage: how many electors are registered? The other one is the accuracy of the information on the electors.
For the last general election we ended up with 94% coverage, meaning that 94% of all eligible electors were registered. That compares rather well with other systems that have mandatory registration. I believe in Australia, for example, their coverage rate is at 95%, even though it's mandatory. So there is, for most electoral bodies, a population out there that's extremely difficult to reach.
In terms of the quality, we are at 84% accuracy of information on electors. The challenge we face there is that we have a churn in the system of about 1.8 million electors, which changes constantly. Mostly these are address changes, but there are also new electors coming on board, new citizens coming on board, and deceased electors. This is a constant churn of about 13% to 18%. That's what is difficult to manage right now.
In terms of moving forward, I think the list is getting better. I hope most of you will recognize that. It's not perfect, but it's getting much better, much more stable. We're continuing to expand our arrangements with provincial bodies. For example, B.C. benefited from the federal list that came out after the October election. That was useful in terms of B.C. Right now, we're benefiting from recent B.C. events in updating our own lists. We have arrangements with electoral bodies across the country.
Over the long term, we believe that e-registration, electronic registration of electors, would help improve accuracy of the list. The idea here is that over time electors will be able to update their information, first, and eventually even register electronically on the Internet. So those who are not captured by different sources we have right now would have this additional option of registering electronically. We're looking at introducing these services in 2010, provided we can renew our IT technology that I mentioned earlier.
Conservative
Guy Lauzon Conservative Stormont—Dundas—South Glengarry, ON
Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.
Thanks for being here, folks.
Here on the bottom of page 5 you say that we expect to have made final reimbursements by August 13 for the candidates' returns that were submitted by February 13. So there's a period of six months there.
How many people would you have reviewing these submissions?
Chief Electoral Officer, Office of the Chief Electoral Officer
I believe there are over 40 auditors right now who are working on reviewing returns. Remember, we have returns from candidates. This is also the time of year when we're getting returns from political parties, and there are 19 of them. We're getting returns also from riding associations, and there are 1,100 of them. So we are in the bulk of the season in terms of—
Conservative
Guy Lauzon Conservative Stormont—Dundas—South Glengarry, ON
What would be the priority? Do you prioritize them in the order of candidates, the EDAs or—
Chief Electoral Officer, Office of the Chief Electoral Officer
We have separate things assigned to riding returns, party returns, and candidate returns. But it's often the same people who are moved around.
Right now we're focusing on candidates' returns. We've dealt with party returns and reimbursements. Right now, our focus and our priority is on candidates' reimbursements.
Conservative
Guy Lauzon Conservative Stormont—Dundas—South Glengarry, ON
The reason I'm asking is because if you have an election in October, it seems to me to be a rather lengthy period of time, especially if you've presented a pretty comprehensive report, and you have to wait eight or nine or ten months to get a reimbursement.
Chief Electoral Officer, Office of the Chief Electoral Officer
First of all, the service standard is six months. It will be six months by August 13.
Conservative
Chief Electoral Officer, Office of the Chief Electoral Officer
Yes, which is when we receive most of the returns. In fact, this time around, we had an increase in the number of late filers. I think over 20% of the returns were filed late. But we still maintain our service standard, six months from February 13, which is the latest date, the statutory date, for filing the returns.
Six months may be long, but, again, unless we move to a system where we have electronic filing for returns, it's going to be difficult to significantly improve that turnaround time. It's not necessarily just an issue...again, we could always have more auditors.
Conservative
Guy Lauzon Conservative Stormont—Dundas—South Glengarry, ON
I'm sure you have a number of files completed now.
