Lessons learned from Penticton election

Penticton’s elections officer had a few suggestions this week for city council to consider before the next municipal election.

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Corporate Services Manager Laurie Darcus, who filled the elections officer role in the recently completed civic election, said overall comments about how the election was handled were positive, but she said there was a few lessons learned through it.

Turnout was substantially better than in 2014 — 10,883 votes cast out of the 26,500 possible voters in Penticton.

“That’s a 41 per cent turnout. In 2014 it was 31 per cent, so that is 10 per cent more,” said Darcus. “What is kind of shocking is we had 3,172 new registrations. I identified that as something we want to look at.”

Darcus suggested it may be possible to tie into the provincial voters’ list, rather than the in-house list.

“We are in discussions with the province to test if their voter list export has the ability to be imported into our in-house system, as the provincial list is more up to date,” she said in her report.

Darcus also suggested council keep the election budget topped up.

“We should consider a comparable budget for the next election. This allowed us to have the number of polls and the number of staff available so we didn’t have the long lineups that were experienced in 2014,” said Darcus, adding that when she timed lineups, she didn’t find any waits longer than 20 minutes.

“So again, the same number of polling stations, if not more,” said Darcus, who also wants to improve the polling station layout in hopes of speeding up the processing and a better overall view of the station for workers.

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Darcus also wants to bring in a mobile polling station in hopes of reaching more voters. For this election, her team visited 13 sites to collect mail-in ballots from residents, mostly assisted-living homes but also the hospital and the hospice.

“I would also like to consider some options for mobile polls instead of using mail ballots for the assisted living homes and the hospitals, maybe even for the college,” said Darcus.

Mail-in ballots, she explained are limited to people with physical disabilities that can’t get to a polling station or those individuals who will be out of town.

By having a mobile poll, Darcus said they could open it up to the workers who are in those locations, or other residents in those locations who are mobile but don’t want to have to go to the polling station.

“But to have a mobile poll, we are going to have to really ask the public to trust us, because we are going to have to take boxes and machines with us,” she said. “I am hoping we have built up that trust so that we can do that next election.”

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