New Westminster residents could start receiving their voting packages next week – but they shouldn’t panic if they don’t arrive in the mail by the end of the month.
Elections B.C. is administering voting for the 2015 Metro Vancouver transportation and transit plebiscite. Registered voters will be able to vote by mail-in ballot from March 15 to May 29.
“The voting packages for the plebiscite are being delivered to registered voters from March 16 to March 27. They are randomly going out to the full Metro area,” said Don Main, communications manager with Elections B.C. “If a registered voter doesn’t receive a package by March 27, they can call Elections B.C. or go online to elections.bc.c/ovr to update their voter registration information and ask for a voting package.”
In order to vote in the plebiscite, Metro Vancouver residents must request a voting package before midnight on Friday, May 15.
“They don’t have to panic,” Main said about people who don’t get a package by March 27. “They have until May 15 to call and register, so they have a couple of months to call. New voters can register.”
If somebody has moved and not updated their voter information with Elections B.C., they may still be registered but they’ll need to call and update their voter information.
“We will cancel that first package because each one is printed for each individual voter,” Main said. “We will cancel that package and issue a replacement package at the new address.”
Advertising at the end of February about the plebiscite “generated some activity” for Elections B.C. staff.
“We have a contact centre at our offices in Victoria that are answering calls for people, and people are calling and updating their information or confirming that they are registered,” Main said. “We are also getting new voters that are calling and registering.”
According to Elections B.C., it will take about 10 minutes to register online. Residents wanting to register to vote or to update their voter registration can call 1-800-661-8683 or go to www.elections.bc.ca/plebiscite.
Once the ballots start arriving back to Elections B.C., Metro Vancouver residents will get an idea of how their community is faring in terms of response – but not how they voted.
“What we will be doing is, because there is 23 voting municipalities, the yellow return envelope has a municipal code on it. We will be separating them all by municipality as they come in. We are going to publish, starting on Wednesday, April 1, the number of yellow packages received. We are publishing that on our website.”
The results will be broken down into packages returned from individual cities, as well as the percentage of registered voters in those areas.
“We will be able to give a running, interim total of how many packages have come in,” Main said. “As we get the packages, we will be opening the ballot package and taking out the certification envelope – that envelope has the voter’s name and address on it, but they are also providing their signature and birth date. Those have to be on the certification envelope.”
When people vote at polling stations for elections, they sign a voting book and provide identification – steps that need to be done in a different way with mail-in ballots.
“This is kind of the reverse way of doing it. You do that when you go to vote before we give you a ballot, now we are asking you to do that after we have already sent you the ballot,” Main said about the mail-in ballot. “We have to do a verification process and we make sure that the information is correct.”
It’s critical that people sign their certification envelope, and not simply mark the ballot.
“They cannot miss that step,” Main said. “It will not be counted.”
Ballots won’t be counted until voting closes on May 29.
