St. John's city clerk Neil Martin is missing the point when he addresses concerns about the mail-in balloting system being used by the City for this month's municipal election.
Martin told VOCM that the problem stems from the voter list supplied by Elections Canada.
As someone who has worked on campaigns for over 20 years and studied them for as long or longer, I can assure Martin the problems are somewhere else.
1. All voter lists contain inaccuracies.
2. Properly functioning voting systems take measures to catch those errors and correct them, all with an eye to prevent fraudulent voting either by:
- someone voting who is not qualified to vote; or,
- someone submitting more than one vote.
3. The Municipal Elections Act contains specific provisions to deal with both those issues. See particularly s. 40 and s. 41 which allow for a challenge of a voter's qualifications to take place at the time a person votes.
4. The City of St. John's mail-in voting by-law is supposed to conform to the spirit and intent of the provincial government's legislation. In other words, the St. John's system has to contain measures to address concerns about fraudulent voting.
5. The municipal by-law contains no provisions at all which prevent, limit or discourage fraudulent voting.
6. The St. John's system does not even contain measures to allow city officials to detect a potentially fraudulent vote.
7. City officials assume that all votes received are legitimate.
8. The ballot forms merely require a signature. There is no specimen signature on file to compare it to in order to determine if the signature is legitimate.
9. The on-line voter list system checks for name and birth-date. Simply adding birthdate to the form returned with the ballot would frustrate anyone who submits a fraudulent ballot.
10. The City of St. John's is ignoring vote fraud. Indeed, by deciding against any measures to prevent fraud, the city's position is tantamount to encouraging electoral wrongdoing.
Nothing will change as long as city officials ignore the problem and their responsibilities to run a legitimate election.
Here are some previous Bond Papers on the problem. Try here and here.
