Evidence of meeting #7 for Procedure and House Affairs in the 43rd Parliament, 2nd session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was voters.
A recording is available from Parliament.
NDP
Daniel Blaikie NDP Elmwood—Transcona, MB
I don't know if that's something we want to resolve right now, or if we want to continue on questioning.
Liberal
The Clerk
I'm sorry about that.
Apparently they are getting a good-quality sound right now. I have received a thumbs-up. I think we are probably good.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Ruby Sahota
Okay. Thank you for bringing that up.
Mr. Tochor, you have five minutes.
Conservative
Corey Tochor Conservative Saskatoon—University, SK
Thank you to our witnesses today.
I'm going to be focusing mostly with Mr. Boda on my province and the election they just held.
As a little bit of context for my questions, the American election going on right now. I'm sure we're all anxious to see the results from down south. I have confidence in our electoral system here in Canada versus some of the problems that might come out of having a decentralized, state-run election. It will be very interesting tonight to see how that unfolds.
I have a couple of technical questions for Michael Boda, as we're all political geeks here. We all get elected, especially the members on the call here.
A ballot usually has a counterfoil. Maybe some of the members don't remember working past elections as scrutineers, not as candidates. We have an issue in Saskatchewan with the counterfoil, which is part of the ballot. The counterfoil is made out of the same material and looks the same. It's used so that we can reference how many ballots are in the ballot box versus how many are voted. You separate the counterfoil, and then you can count them afterwards.
The problem we experienced in Saskatchewan is that the counterfoil was also put in the ballot box, or was encouraged to be. That's where it ended up. Then when they opened the ballot box to count, I have heard numerous stories of issues with that.
Mr. Boda, would you encourage other elections not to put the counterfoil in the ballot box?
November 3rd, 2020 / 11:45 a.m.
Chief Electoral Officer, Elections Saskatchewan
I would have to assess it first. I had not heard that this was a problem.
One of the challenges is that the counterfoils are put into the ballot box after the fact. They remain in there so that we can evaluate after the fact.
I haven't heard this to be a problem, Mr. Tochor, but I would certainly be willing to look into it further.
Conservative
Corey Tochor Conservative Saskatoon—University, SK
I heard it anecdotally. We just had the debriefing last Monday, and I totally understand that it might take some time to digest all the findings from an election.
It was more on the counting. There were ballots that potentially could be viewed as a foil and thrown into one pile and/or not counted in any of the precautions.
Conservative
Corey Tochor Conservative Saskatoon—University, SK
I will move on. It's just FYI. We can look into that for Saskatchewan and then for our federal election, whenever that occurs. I would strongly recommend that we separate the two.
On the mail-in ballot—
Chief Electoral Officer, Elections Saskatchewan
Just to be clear on the counterfoil, Mr. Tochor, the counterfoil is not put into the ballot box when the ballot is cast. That's normally the way it works. The counterfoil remains outside the box. It may be that after the fact they were placed into the ballot box. I'm certainly willing to look into it further.
Conservative
Corey Tochor Conservative Saskatoon—University, SK
I appreciate that.
When I voted in person, you had to force it into the ballot box. It is awesome that we had that much turnout in my poll. The worker said that I had to put it in the ballot box, which made it a little challenging.
I digress. I'm sure we will figure out if that was widespread. Maybe it was just locally in Saskatoon, with the instructions about a ballot box.
Conservative
Corey Tochor Conservative Saskatoon—University, SK
The other concern I had was with the mail-in ballots. They listed all the registered parties, and you could just write in the name of the party versus the name of the candidates.
What is your experience, or have you heard back on how many spoiled ballots there were for people who wrote the name of a party that they wanted to vote for on the mail-in ballots, but ultimately there was no candidate for that party, so that ballot would have been spoiled?
Do we know how many, roughly?
Chief Electoral Officer, Elections Saskatchewan
Well, we're still in the midst of the count. We had what was called our second preliminary count this past week. During that time, we began to count the vote-by-mail ballots. Now, this coming Saturday, we will count the rest of those ballots. These are form B ballots, as you mentioned, on which you write down either the candidate or the political party, and so that is how it is counted.
With respect to your question, I don't have the numbers of rejected ballots yet, but I will have those relatively soon. We have to get through the process first.
Conservative
Corey Tochor Conservative Saskatoon—University, SK
I appreciate that. I appreciate the fact that we actually invited you to come to the committee a day afterward, on Tuesday, and how ridiculous a request it may have been on our part as a committee. I know how busy you are right now, and the election isn't over.
My time's going to run out here, but I just want to say thank you for the election you ran. I believe it was fair. Under the circumstances, everyone did the best they could.
One question I had was in the context—
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Ruby Sahota
That's all the time we have. The five minutes are up.
Anyway, we do appreciate your being here, Dr. Boda. I'm sorry if we were too eager to get you here as soon as possible, but we're eager to undertake this study and figure out how to run an election from coast to coast to coast. It's a big undertaking.
Next we have Mr. Turnbull for five minutes, please.
Liberal
Ryan Turnbull Liberal Whitby, ON
Thanks, Madam Chair. Thanks to both the witnesses today. It's really great to have you here. I'm really impressed by your testimony and have learned a lot from you already.
Mr. Boegman, maybe I'll start with you. My questions will probably be relevant for both of you. I'm interested in the mail-in ballots and the sheer increase in the number. I know you said that the survey you did prior to the B.C. election suggested that about 35% of voters said that they would prefer a mail-in ballot. Is that consistent with what you saw? Sometimes people say in surveys that they'll act a certain way, and then later they don't behave the way they said they would. Is it pretty consistent?
Chief Electoral Officer, Elections BC
Our experience was that it was very consistent, and we're certainly within the 30% to 35% range in requests for packages to be issued.
Liberal
Ryan Turnbull Liberal Whitby, ON
Okay, great. Thank you very much for that. You said it was an increase of 7,200%. Anybody out there can recognize that's just a huge, massive increase in the demand for those mail-in ballots.
You also mentioned that you had done quite a bit of work in the past to revamp. I wonder about the extent to which that previous work set the foundation to be able to have a successful election with such an increase. Could you speak to whether you streamlined the user experience for individual electors? Mail-in ballots can be a bit complex, I think, for people, or a bit scary even, if you haven't done it before. Did you streamline the experience to make it simple for people?
Chief Electoral Officer, Elections BC
I guess there are two points I want to make.
One is in response to your first comment about how well prepared we were, based on our previous experience. I would say that without the previous work that we had done, it would have been extremely challenging to provide a similar level of service in terms of being able to fulfill the requests that we received. The work we had done previously was essential to our ability to provide voting by mail on that scale.
I also think that the familiarity of most British Columbians with the vote-by-mail process was directly related to their experience in previous vote-by-mail events. In 2011 a full provincial referendum on a tax issue was held by voting by mail. In 2015 metro Vancouver, 1.6 million voters, had a mail-based plebiscite on another transportation and tax issue. Then we had a province-wide referendum on electoral reform in 2018. Our lessons learned from those events around the design of the voting package, the design of the instructions and how to minimize error through design were critical.
One example is that the voters were required to provide a shared secret on their certification envelope, which was their date of birth. We'd found previously that if you'd just leave that as a blank field, a voter would often put in the date that they signed their certification envelope. They're used to signing a cheque or anything else, so we pre-populated that based on the first two digits of their year of birth. That made it very evident to them that we were looking for the date of birth there, as opposed to having a free-form field.
You had another question. I'm sorry, I've....
Liberal
Ryan Turnbull Liberal Whitby, ON
No, that's great. I'm really interested in that information, because it sounds like you've done quite a bit of work to streamline the process. I know you talked about developing the capacity and the fact that you had infrastructure systems and processes already in place.
Could you table with this committee any documentation that you have? I think it would be extremely helpful for us to look at that.
Chief Electoral Officer, Elections BC
I'll certainly have a word with the part of my team that was responsible for that aspect, and if there are operational documents that we're able to table, I will look to do that.
Liberal
Ryan Turnbull Liberal Whitby, ON
I appreciate that very much.
Dr. Boda, do you have anything to say on this? You also had a significant increase, I would imagine, for mail-in ballots. Have you had to streamline the process? Is there any insight you can give us as well?
Chief Electoral Officer, Elections Saskatchewan
We in Saskatchewan have not had the experience with voting by mail that British Columbia has had in the past. They have had four events, kind of practising for this event.
Our numbers have gone from 1% of individuals participating to about 12.5%, so there was a significant increase. We had to change our model because we did not feel we would be able to manage or would have the capacity to run the vote-by-mail operation. We had done significant survey research in advance, looking at what was going on in British Columbia, looking at our survey and looking at the Canadian survey as well.
In our instance, actually, the turnout for vote-by-mail was lower than we had anticipated. That was good, because we had to build centralized capacity for voting by mail, so that was very important.