The current members of city council may have been successful on election day, but they have some concerns about a variety of issues that arose on voting day.
Council has directed staff to report back on a number of issues that occurred when electors headed to the polls on Nov. 15, 2014.
“We had difficulty with some machines,’ said Coun. Bill Harper. “We had difficulty with the process around machines when they needed to be shut down. We had long lineups.”
Coun. Chuck Puchmayr said the city has talked about ways of making it easier for people to vote, but issues on voting day made it difficult for people to vote, including those who needed assistance because English was their second language.
“I saw people walking away from polls,” Puchmayr said. “We don’t want that.”
Puchmayr believes it’s important of the city to discuss issues related to the election “earlier in the game” so problems can be identified and addressed long before the next election.
“There was issues with the voting machines, there was an issue with how different polling places treated voter assistants – people who were coming in to assist voters that had issues with English as a second language,” he said. “There were issues with how staffing all appeared to have been hired through ads in the newspaper. There were people with very high skills that ended up being greeters at the door, instead of doing jobs that they’d been doing for many, many years at municipal, federal and provincial elections. I don’t think we capitalized on the skill sets that we have in the community.”
Puchmayr said it’s important to take steps to help the elections run smoothly – and consistently – across the city.
“We are talking about wanting more people to participate in the electoral process,” he said. “I think those are some small but significant and important things that we need to address so it runs smoothly, and if it doesn’t run smoothly, every voting place uses the same criteria so that someone in Queensborough doesn’t have a poorer chance of voting than someone in, let’s say, Massey Heights. At least the criteria is equal.”
Harper thinks the city should put a notice in the local newspaper asking people who had issues while working or voting on election day to contact city hall. He said he’s heard a lot of feedback from people who had concerns about the issues at polling stations on election day.
On Monday, council received a staff report about candidates who had failed to file campaign disclosure statements for the 2014 local government election. Council then directed the city clerk to report back on issues that occurred in the recent election.
According to the staff report, school trustee candidates Glen Armstrong and James Pepa failed to file by the provincial deadline, so they are disqualified from being nominated for, elected to or holding office on a local authority until after the next local election.
The Local Elections Campaign Financing Act requires the report about disqualified candidates to be presented at an open council meeting.
