New Brunswick, British Columbia and Saskatchewan all had provincial elections this autumn. Here’s how they protected their voters and their democracies.
A snap election, over the shortest possible period, during a global pandemic.
It sounds like a recipe for disaster and yet, a few weeks after it was all said and done, New Brunswick chief electoral officer Kim Poffenroth reported the country’s first election in the time of COVID went well.
“Voter turnout was good and we had no cases of COVID as a result of voting, so I think that’s the best we can hope for under the circumstances,” says Poffenroth.
Provincial premier Blaine Higgs’s call for an election in late August seemed like a knee-jerk move to capitalize on his performance in protecting the province from COVID-19 devastation and turn his minority government into a majority. But given that his government was already in a minority situation, Elections New Brunswick naturally wasn’t caught completely off guard when the Sept. 14 election was called. In addition, the elections team already knew it would have to hold at least two provincial byelections over the autumn of 2020, when the second wave would no doubt hit, and, municipal elections, for which the provincial electoral office is also responsible, were postponed from May 2020 and have to be held by May 2021 at the latest.
“So, the whole team started thinking [back then] about what we were going to have to do differently; what measures were we going to have to put in place?” Poffenroth says. “When the call came, it wasn’t so much concern about whether we were ready for an election in a pandemic, it was about whether we could execute in the time that we had. We had a 28-day election period, which is the shortest allowed by New Brunswick legislation.”
In its goal to keep New Brunswickers safe in a pandemic, Elections New Brunswick had a few strategies: It encouraged voting by mail, a service that saw a tremendous surge; it offered all of the COVID-19 protection protocols at advance polls and on election day; it set up temporary polls in long-term care homes and hospital wards and it offered daily voting at returning offices for the duration of the election.
Poffenroth was in touch with her counterparts in British Columbia and Saskatchewan before, during and after the New Brunswick election as those two provinces prepared for their own elections, which were to take place Oct. 24 and Oct. 26, respectively.
Anton Boegman, chief electoral officer for British Columbia, said his team’s focus in the leadup to B.C.’s provincial election was “to create safe plans for in-person voting, as well as providing a range of accessible opportunities for voters while maintaining the overall integrity of the process.” His budget was increased by $5.7 million to put in new measures. Elections Saskatchewan was taking a similar approach.
Voter experience
Fredericton voter Darrell Mesheau, a retired citizenship and immigration officer, said he had a good experience, both in voting and in scrutineering for his chosen party.
“In terms of running smoothly, a lot of people voted at the advance polls or at the returning offices; I’ve voted there the last two or three times,” says Mesheau, a member of Federal Retirees. “Everything worked really well. One person said they felt safer voting than they do at the grocery store.”
In the suburbs outside Saint John, Lorraine Scott, who is president of the Fundy Shores branch of Federal Retirees, had no issues, either.
“Everything worked really well. One person said they felt safer voting than they do at the grocery store.”
“I live in the Kennebecasis Valley and we’ve had one case of COVID-19 and that was at the very beginning of the pandemic,” says Scott, a Federal Retiree who worked for Service Canada in Saint John. “We went to the polling station, mask on. They asked about symptoms. You had to sanitize your hands. Everything was marked. The pen wasn’t sanitized in between, but we sanitized our hands before and after. I wasn’t worried.”
In St. Louis-de-Kent, in northern New Brunswick, Federal Retirees member Barry Spencer said he decided to vote on election day to see how things were set up, having volunteered in elections over the past 25 years. His wife has Crohn’s disease, so her immune system is compromised, but she chanced joining him as there were no cases in the province at the time.
Poll workers who weren’t behind Plexiglas wore masks and face shields and were given gloves if they wanted them.
“The organization and the speed and arrangements were far better than in previous years,” says Spencer, who retired from Parks Canada after 37 years. “A lot of thought had gone into it. It was a very pleasant experience. We thought about voting by mail, but mainly because of my previous experience, I wanted to see how it worked.”
Vote by mail
More than half of those who voted in the New Brunswick election did so before election day and there was an upsurge in the number of mail-in ballots. A campaign with the slogan “Vote Early and Vote Safely” appears to have caught on. More than 13,000 vote-by-mail packages were issued and 7,000 of those were delivered by hand to residents of long-term care facilities.
“We had a significant increase in mail-in ballots,” Poffenroth says. “We were encouraging voters to take advantage of a number of early voting opportunities in order to flatten the election curve.”
Normally, the province’s 49 returning offices would receive a handful of mail-in ballots, which were mostly designed for people temporarily living outside the province. This time, every riding in the province reported receiving hundreds.
Poffenroth was especially pleased that they received mail-in ballots from some members of the Canadian Armed Forces stationed in Latvia. They made it back at the final hour — on election day.
In British Columbia, vote-by-mail is more established. In all, Elections B.C. received 670,000 requests for vote-by-mail packages.
“That’s a very significant number,” says B.C.’s Boegman. “But in British Columbia, voters are very familiar with vote-by-mail.”
Since 2002, there have been three provincewide referendums in B.C. — one in 2018, one in 2011 and one in 2002, the latter of which was entirely by mail.
Mail-in votes have to be received by 8 p.m. on election night and they are counted after election day. All have to be checked against the poll records to make sure a person didn’t vote twice.
“In the last election, we probably had 180,000 [mail-in] ballots to count,” Boegman says. “This time, we are close to 525,000. The initial count [on election night] is always a preliminary count [because of that.]”
Elections Saskatchewan had a huge increase in vote-by-mail interest. In the 2016 general election, it received 5,000 requests for vote-by-mail packages. This time, they mailed out 61,000 packages and received 55,000 back.
“That impacts the counting because we don’t count the mail-in votes until after election day,” says Tim Kydd, a spokesman for Elections Saskatchewan.
N.B. Progressive Conservative Premier Blaine Higgs.
Protection at polls
Elections New Brunswick put in all the protective measures it could at returning offices, advanced polls and polls on election day. All poll workers wore either face masks or face shields, and all voters were asked to bring a face mask with them. Disposable masks were also available. Voters were met by people controlling traffic flow and hand sanitizer was available at poll entry and exit points. Markings on the floor indicated which way to walk and where to stand.
“We had another person who was disinfecting high-touch surfaces and wiping down markers used for ballots,” Poffenroth says.
In total, pandemic precautions meant that the province had to hire 900 more people
to run the election. “Normally we have 4,500 poll workers and this year, we had 900 more,” she says. “So that was a 20-per-cent increase in employment.”
British Columbia had all the same protocols in place. Poll workers who weren’t behind Plexiglas wore masks and face shields and were given gloves if they wanted them. There was hand sanitizer on the way in and out of polling stations and voters were allowed to bring their own pencil or pen to mark their vote. Masks were also available for voters who didn’t bring one.
“I feel people received the information about early voting and were also comfortable with what we were doing to keep our workers and voters safe.”
B.C. doubled its complement of “information officers” to help voters through the process. In addition, voters no longer had to sign their name as a declaration in a voting log. Instead, they did the declaration orally.
In an effort to create more distancing at polls, Elections Saskatchewan jumped from approximately 800 voting locations across the province to 1,143 locations in 2020. That growth in numbers also meant it had to hire more poll workers. In addition, the prairie province had single-use pencils and a discard box behind the voting screen.
Advance polls and returning office voting
New Brunswick didn’t increase the number of advance polls, but turnout at the ones it did hold was significantly higher than the previous election and officials will consider whether adding a day or two makes sense when they do their
post-election analysis. In 2018, slightly fewer than 88,000 voted over two advanced-poll days. That number was up to 131,000 in September 2020.
B.C. added one extra day of advance polls — from six days to seven. Since 2005, Boegman has seen a shift in voters’ preferences. Back then, 90 per cent voted on election day with five per cent voting in advance and the other five per cent at a returning office. But in the last election, 30 per cent voted in advance polls.
Voter turnout
Poffenroth was pleased with the voter turnout in the New Brunswick election. In 2018, it was 66.4 per cent; in 2020, it was down slightly to 66.1.
“Given all of the circumstances, particularly around the pandemic, I’m very pleased from the perspective with the turnout,” she says. “I feel people received the information about early voting and were also comfortable with what we were doing to keep our workers and voters safe.”
Voter turnout in B.C. was down to an estimated 52.4 per cent from 61.18 per cent in the 2017 election. Saskatchewan saw a small increase — from 51 per cent in 2016 to 53 per cent in 2020.
Adjustments for next time
Poffenroth says New Brunswick will hold its provincewide municipal elections in the spring when COVID is still a factor and she’ll monitor those before deciding what changes to entrench.
“Do we centralize the processing of mail-in ballots?” she speculates. “And keep the returning offices focused on the walk-ins?”
Normally, after an election, all chief returning officers and their assistants gather in Fredericton for a debrief, but with COVID, they won’t do that. Rather, they’ll do it remotely with field liaison officers.
COVID chaos in the U.S.
Americans went to the polls at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic in their country. Long snake-like lineups — with voters spaced out six feet from each other — marked visits to advance polls and at polls on election day.
States took different approaches to health protocols, but generally, poll workers wore masks and were often positioned behind Plexiglas. They spaced out voting screens to allow for physical distancing.
Many — more than 46 million — voted by mail-in ballot and states each had their own rules about when the ballots must be received and how they would be counted. Wisconsin, a state that was too close to call on election night, had five times as many mail-in votes as it did in 2016. Florida, whose population skews older, making the state more vulnerable to the virus, saw 3.4 million residents vote by mail.
The pandemic didn’t appear to keep Americans from voting as voter turnout hit records in some states. Preliminary numbers showed that 81 per cent of Minnesotans voted, while 75 per cent of Floridians cast ballots. The lowest turnout was in Alaska, estimated at 36 per cent.