Mieka West and her family estimate they waited three hours to vote in Calgary’s municipal election on Monday.
“There were probably … a hundred people in line, and they had been there for a while,” said West, who voted at the Ward 9 Colonel Walker School polling station in Inglewood in the late afternoon.
“Every time I voted in the past, it’s been about five to maybe 30 minutes. It felt like it was a bit of a waste of our time.”
On Election Day, voters across the city reported long and slow-moving lines and questioned why this election seemed different from others.
In Ward 11, Chance Devlin said he wasn’t able to wait and ended up not voting at all.
“I got there and the lineup was really long … I meant to come back, but I also heard from other people it was still a long lineup.”
But considering how close the mayoral election’s unofficial results were — on Tuesday, fewer than 600 votes separated winner Jeromy Farkas and runner-up Sonya Sharp — Devlin said he regrets not voting.
“I know that every vote counts, and I take it as a duty to vote, so I do feel bad that I didn’t go back,” said Devlin.
University of Calgary political science professor Lisa Young also took longer than an hour to vote. She blames it on recent changes by the provincial government.
“It became pretty clear that the hold-up was that the poll workers had to fill out voter attestation forms for everybody, including their name, their address, and then get a signature,” she said.
Young is referring to the Elector Register, which new provincial rules require to be completed for every voter, to account for each ballot issued. That was a new requirement from the province, in addition to hand counting the ballots.
She said the changes had been pitched as something to ensure voter confidence, but she doesn’t think that was responding to a real problem.
“There are very few recorded instances of voter fraud … it certainly was a significant set of changes for a problem that it’s not clear that we had.”
Having more polling stations or election workers would have helped — but that’s also costly, she said.
“This was a pretty labour-intensive effort already, so I can see why the city didn’t spend more money on this.”
“I think the experience of this election is going to make people ask questions … both in terms of the forms, but also in terms of taking away the vote tabulators,” Young said. “I think that if the province is pushed to justify the choices that they made, that they may have a difficult time. It will be interesting to see if they open the door to revisiting the process.”
In an interview with CBC News Tuesday afternoon, Municipal Affairs Minister Dan Williams focused the blame on municipalities, saying they are responsible for conducting elections and knew about the new regulations for more than a year.
“I’m hoping that the labour shortages are corrected going forward,” he said.
Williams said the ban on electronic vote tabulators came amid “skepticism around the results of elections and their legitimacy” both domestically and internationally.
“Whether you’re talking about [elections] across the world or you look at our own federal and provincial elections, counting hand ballots provides the most confidence when it comes to election results,” he said.
Young is not the only one suggesting the minister should have to justify the changes.
Alberta Municipalities is reaching out to its members to get a provincewide picture of how the elections went.
In St. Albert, outgoing mayor and former Alberta Municipalities president Cathy Heron said the long waits were discouraging.
“There were lots of people [who] tried to vote and they didn’t, which is unfortunate,” she said.
The voter turnout in St. Albert was about 30 per cent, she said, “which is the lowest since my memory can remember. And you would think [St. Albert’s] open mayor’s race would bring people to the polls.”
As of Tuesday afternoon, the City of Calgary had not yet released its voter turnout.
Heron said provincial politicians told her the changes were made to increase voter confidence, but “I think it’s actually done the opposite, to tell you the truth.”
Meanwhile, some voters reported missing school trustee ballots or ballots from the wrong ward at their polls.
When Brian Popp went to his voting station at Platform Calgary in East Village on Monday, he said he was told the separate school trustee election wasn’t being contested. In fact, two candidates were seeking the seat.
“They said, ‘We don’t have Catholic school board ballots here,’” the Ward 7 resident told CBC News.
“I said, ‘Well, we have a right to vote for our candidate of our choice,’ and they said, ‘Well, for sure that’s true, but they’re in by acclamation.’”
His wife called the candidate they intended to vote for to confirm, and that candidate called Elections Calgary. When Popp returned to the polling station about an hour later, he and his wife got a ballot.
“I’m extremely disappointed. I mean, it’s important to us to vote. They’re always telling us to get out and vote.”
City spokesperson Sherri Zickefoose said there were adequate separate school board ballots at Platform Calgary.
“Ballot allocations are routinely monitored, and additional supplies of ballots are replenished as required,” she said in a statement.
But Popp’s not alone. Catholic school board voters at two other polling stations in different wards also told CBC News they were initially denied ballots.
Ward 6 voter Theresa Mills said she was told there were no Catholic school trustee ballots at her Glamorgan polling station. She ended up not voting for a trustee and called her preferred candidate later to complain.
In Mount Royal, Ward 8 voter Simon Yip said he wasn’t able to vote in the public school board trustee race for a different reason.
“When I opened [my ballot] up, all the names were incorrect,” he said.
Yip said election workers told him they had received ballots for the wrong ward. He waited half an hour to see if the correct ballots would come in before leaving without casting a ballot for trustee.
“I’m sorry that my candidate won’t be getting my vote,” said Yip. “I wasn’t able to fulfill my duty. … I vote in every single election, and it’s never like this.”
