Madam Chair, honourable members, thank you for the opportunity to meet with you today.
My name is Michael Boda. I'm the chief electoral officer for the Province of Saskatchewan. I've been back here in Saskatchewan since 2012, but for the last two and a half decades I've worked on election administration around the world in places like the U.S., the U.K. and a lot of developing countries.
Last Monday at 8 p.m., voting closed for Saskatchewan's provincial election, with approximately 434,000 voters having cast their ballots. The initial participation rate looks to be about 52% of eligible voters. In 2016 it was about 54%.
Almost every aspect of administration of our provincial election has been impacted by the global COVID-19 pandemic, except perhaps that turnout, which looks to be very close to our 2016 numbers. I do hope that some of those turnout numbers can be traced back to the significant effort we put into ensuring that voters knew that voting would be no more risky than a trip to the local grocery store.
While there hasn't been much time to assess the conduct of the election—we're actually completing our final count this weekend—I want to describe for you three key steps that I believe have contributed to what has unfolded so far.
Our first step focused very much on our adapting Saskatchewan's election system to lower the risk of spreading the coronavirus. In fact, we pursued many methods to achieve this, but our overarching approach was focused on building capacity in our now three principal areas of voting by reinventing our absentee or vote-by-mail function—in 2016, just 1% of voters participated in this way—and doing everything we could to make both advance and election day voting safer.
Not knowing how many voters would take advantage of each of these opportunities, we had to quickly build capacity for vote-by-mail so that we could allow for applications starting more than two months before the election day for voters who felt that attending a poll could be a health hazard for them.
Early on we also determined that to make things safer, voting-in-person opportunities would need to be spread out in a very different way, meaning that where we might have had five or six polls at a location in 2016, instead we would have just two or three polls. In the end, our number of polling locations grew from just 1,100 in 2016 to nearly 1,900 in 2020.
In a second step, we understood, as an election management body, that not only would we need to ensure that our physical polls met the safety standards of public health officials but also that our voters and workers would have to be convinced that in-person voting would be safe even with elevated levels of COVID-19.
Working closely with our chief medical health officer, we adapted our physical polls in order to reduce the risk of spreading COVID-19. Our 2020 polls look very different from those from 2016, with protocols including physical distancing, hand sanitizing, barriers between voters and workers, masks being required for all workers and scrutineers and a strong recommendation that all voters wear a mask.
While I believe we took every reasonable step to make our polls safer, this really wasn't enough. We also had to ensure that voters knew that the polls would be safe. In the weeks leading to the election, we worked very hard to educate stakeholders, voters, scrutineers and election workers so that if perceptions of the risk of COVID-19 changed in the province, stakeholders would remain convinced that visiting the polls in person would be safe.
A third and final step that was essential to the effective conduct of our election related to the importance of relationships between election administrators and our stakeholders. As chief electoral officer, I could not have conducted this election without a strong recognition among voters, government, the legislative assembly, parties, candidates, school boards, first nation communities, personal care facilities and so on that to be successful in 2020, the process would have to unfold very differently from the way it did in 2016. Perhaps most important has been our relationship, my relationship, with the Office of the Chief Medical Health Officer.
As an election administrator, I have always believed that an election is not merely a technical exercise but also that strong relationships with stakeholders are essential to the success of the conduct of an event. Our 2020 election in Saskatchewan only reinforced that for me. Working with all stakeholders, we had to adapt to ensure that the process was safer for everyone participating.
Thank you again for the opportunity to participate.
I also would be pleased to answer any questions, Madam Chair.