All right, if Kim doesn't mind, I can take the lead on this one.
First of all, I would like to say hello to everyone and thank you for the opportunity to come to speak to you today. It was nice to get the invitation.
We're in the middle of a by-election here now and we have some busy days, but today is a bit of a down day, so that's a good thing.
We are the smallest province to run an electoral event during the pandemic. I hope I can highlight some of the challenges we've had and some of the challenges we've overcome as we're going through this, and the successes we've had.
Once this pandemic began, as in most places, we decided to work remotely and we all started working from home. We were able to do that without too much of a problem here.
We've been very fortunate here in P.E.I., within the Atlantic bubble, to have little to no community spread of COVID-19. We decided at that point, with an office of only three staff, and in a minority situation, that we would reopen the office with very limited public access and physical distancing rules in place to plan for the possibility of a pending election. Again, being in a minority situation we always have to be ready within our office, and with the COVID pandemic that was going to be a new challenge, so we wanted to be sure we had everything in place were that to happen.
We really began just in the background, just slowly preparing things. We weren't very concerned about a snap election being called here in P.E.I., unlike some other jurisdictions. The minority government has been working very well collaboratively here, and there was not much sign of a snap election taking place, but we still needed to be prepared in any case.
Then, in early September, one of our members of the legislative assembly from district 10 decided to resign, and that's when our office started planning for a pending by-election. The clock started to tick for us. We essentially had a six-month window, and playing that election bingo on the calendar, we began trying to calculate when the next date for the election would be. Of course, there was the possibility of a full general election if the government decided it wanted to take that route as well. We were preparing for both, but mainly thinking we were just going to be looking at the by-election in one of our districts.
We started to work right away with the chief public health officer of P.E.I. to draft a plan for how an election would be run here. We did have a requirement in our legislation to do a full door-to-door enumeration process for that district, but we were able to get that waived. I have some authority under the act during such a time to be able to bypass certain sections of the act. We had agreement from our legal...as well as from all four parties here that were planning to put candidates forward, that we could bypass that. There was that requirement that says if it's further than seven months away from the previous one, and we were 10 months away from doing one in our last election, so everyone agreed that we could get away with that, which was very nice.
We started to procure some supplies. As we all know, it became challenging to get some things, and we would need them in larger numbers, so hand sanitizers, disinfectant wipes, face masks, shields, stickers for the floor, plexiglass barriers, all of this we started to procure, as we could, in order to get ready for this.
Once the writ period began, we started to work on obtaining the workers that we would need at the polls, developing training sessions that could be COVID-compliant with social distancing and things taking place. As well, we worked on the voting location itself to make sure there was a separate entrance and exit, and that we would have ample space to house the workers, the electors and the scrutineers.
We've had two advance voting days so far, one of them being just yesterday. We've had very good turnout with people all in all wearing their masks. They are being very compliant. They're being very understanding. We haven't had any wait times, which is very good, and we're up to about a 30% turnout so far after just the first two days of voting, which is great.
Anyway, I'm happy to answer questions that come up going forward, and I hope to be able to offer some insight.
Thank you very much.