Manitobans waiting longer for official election results

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This article was published 11/10/2023 (723 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Manitobans are waiting longer for official election results compared to the provincial vote in 2019 after new technology to tally votes was introduced this year.

Elections Manitoba will release the province’s official results Friday — 10 days after Manitobans cast their ballots in the 43rd general election. In 2019, official results were released after one week.

Elections Manitoba said the office determined earlier this year that results would be released Oct. 13.

However, the office has refused to explain why it will take longer to release results this year compared to 2019, other than to say Thanksgiving was a factor in setting the date.

Efforts to modernize and expand the electoral process to make voting easier ended up taking longer to get a final count on election night, the independent office said Tuesday — as results online remained “unofficial.”

“While we didn’t deliver the results quite as quickly as we would have liked, Manitobans can be assured that this was a free and fair election,” Elections Manitoba said in an oft-repeated response to media questions about delays in getting results.

Chief electoral officer Shipra Verma was not available for an interview Tuesday, when online results still showed one unreported poll in the fly-in community of St. Theresa Point, where flight cancellations have delayed getting the ballots out.

They’ve since been received, Elections Manitoba spokesman Mike Ambrose said in an email Tuesday.

“They were bumped multiple times due to flight weight capacity and other delays,” he said, adding the situation is not unusual for fly-in communities in the North.

He reiterated earlier statements that more than 900 polling places were operational with significant vote tabulating technology and contingency plans.

Although election day was beset with storm-related power outages at polling places in several areas, manual ballot boxes were used to make sure the voting continued uninterrupted. When the polls closed, ballots cast manually and by vote-counting machine had to be combined. New reporting and reconciliation procedures also extended the count time, he said.

And firewall problems with Elections Manitoba’s website that caused access interruptions are being investigated, Ambrose said.

“A lot went well with the delivery of this election,” he said, reminding Manitobans that new tools such as the electronic voters list, bar-code scanners for voter information cards and printing on-demand ballots for advance voting allowed for better service and more opportunities for Manitobans to participate.

“Because of the current cynical public mood about government, doing nearly everything right is still not good enough to escape close scrutiny and criticism,” said Paul Thomas, who served on the Elections Canada Advisory Board for five years from its founding to dissolution (2014-2019).

Fair and free elections administered by an impartial, independent, professional agency such as Elections Manitoba depend on there being citizen trust and confidence in the process, the University of Manitoba political studies professor emeritus said Tuesday.

Conspiracy theories and false accusations about voting technology that have spilled over the border into Canada from the U.S. don’t help, he said.

“Constructive criticism of Elections Manitoba is to be welcomed, but false accusations of incompetence or bias — like those uttered by some prominent politicians in the U.S. and, to a lesser extent, in Canada — are corrosive of public acceptance of the legitimacy of election results.”

In Manitoba, the system is transparent and accountable, Thomas said.

The chief electoral officer always prepares a report on the administration of an election, with analysis of deficiencies and recommendations for improvement, the veteran political observer noted.

“That report is always reviewed by a committee of the legislature,” he said, adding the standing committee on legislative affairs sets the date for the meeting, and it is open to the public.

In the meantime, eligible voters or candidates who have a bone to pick with the process and the outcome have until Oct. 19 — six days after the official results are posted — to apply for a judicial recount, Elections Manitoba said Tuesday.

If the difference between the winning candidate and the one in second place is 50 votes or less, the returning officer must apply for a judicial recount. There were no races that ended up being that close in last week’s election.

Elections Manitoba, meanwhile, said it has de-registered the Manitoba Party, effective Tuesday.

Under the Election Financing Act, if a registered party does not endorse at least five candidates in a general election, the chief electoral officer of Manitoba must de-register it after the election. There were no candidates from the party who ran in the election.

As part of the de-registration process, the party must file an audited annual 2023 return for the period Jan. 1-Oct. 10, Elections Manitoba said.

carol.sanders@freepress.mb.ca