Thank you, and good morning.
I want to start by acknowledging that I am speaking to you today from the traditional territories of the Coast Salish, the Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh first nations here in Vancouver, and I'm very grateful to be able to speak to you from these beautiful territories.
We've been asked to talk about elections. As you know, we just completed one, although the final vote is not yet in, given the election legal requirement out here that you need to wait a certain amount of time for counting the ballots.
We learned quite a lot. I think the biggest thing we learned was to connect early and often. Where I come from in Prince Edward Island, we say that about voting: vote early and vote often.
Out here, we met with Elections BC starting in March. There were scheduled elections meant to happen in March. On my advice, we postponed those, given the situation we were dealing with at the time. We continued to meet to answer a number of questions. In particular, we developed a very detailed guidance, and that was very helpful. We met a number of times with Elections BC, but we also had question-and-answer sessions and detailed sessions with all of the electoral officers from each of the 87 electoral districts around B.C. We did Zoom meetings on those. Those were also very helpful.
As I'm sure is the same for federal elections, many of the people who work on elections are older and of a demographic that is concerned about their own health, and COVID in particular. We were able to allay fears and make sure we had all of the processes in place. We have detailed guidance on that, which we're happy to share.
Another thing that I think is really important is that we met with an all-party committee. The political parties have a committee—this is my not understanding the political part of things—around elections. We met with them a number of times to make sure each party had guidance on how they could conduct campaigns safely during COVID. We talked about things like going door to door and what that would look like, having smaller gatherings, not allowing large groups together, wearing masks and all of those things that are important in campaigning safely during this period of time.
I think there were three things that were the most important. Allowing the ability to mail in ballots was really helpful, not only for the public but also for the people who work in the elections. There were all kinds of questions. For example, what if somebody licks the ballot envelope; does that mean it's safe? We talked a lot about washing their hands.
We had extended advance polls and made sure they were over the weekend. That became really important. There was a lot of concern, as many voting places are schools. Schools are designed to be very easy. People can be indoors. You can separate them. There are gyms or other large spaces. Because our schools are back in session, for the teachers and students to feel that they were being respected and safe, it was important to have those places available on the weekends and to have other places during the week. We didn't want people mixing with the students and teachers in the school. Extending our advance polls for a longer period of days and over weekends was important.
As well, we switched the voting day. It normally would be a Tuesday, and it was switched to a Saturday. That proved to be really beneficial in a number of ways. One, it meant that we could use voting places like schools again, but it also meant that people who would normally be at work on election day were able to work in some of the voting stations. We had a broader swath of people who were available to work. Anton Boegman, our chief electoral officer here in British Columbia, can give you many of the details. We reduced it from two people sitting at a table to one. That worked very efficiently. We had provisions for being able put in plexiglass barriers so that people could hold up their ID. There are lots of details that made it very efficient and very safe.
Lots of people voted, although I understand it was one of the lowest turnouts that we've had. It was all done safely. There were no incidents that we were aware of. It was really a matter of walking through all of the possibilities ahead of time and making sure that people were confident in being able to do it safely.