Enjoy this little story from VOCM, quoting city clerk Neil Martin on how smurfily goes the mail-in voting for St. John's city council.
Then pick up the Telegram and find the facts.
Martin predicted a couple of things: one was that the turnout would be over 60% and possibly as high as 75% this time. He also predicted that 90% of ballots would be returned no later than 19 September.
The city mailed out about 75, 000 vote-by-mail kits.
As of Thursday morning, the elections crowd at city hall had received 25, 000 ballots back. As of close of business Tuesday, they had 21, 000 according to a city hall official contacted on Wednesday by the Bond Papers. There is some confusion here about whether those are 21 or 25, 000 valid ballots or total ballots, but the point is still clear: the turn-out so far is about 30%, and it is not likely to get much higher. In other words, that's one third of what Martin expected and it will be lucky to crack 40%.
But here's a Telly kicker - of the ballots received on Thursday (as the Telegram tells it - might have been Wednesday), fully 600 were chucked in the bin as being spoiled. They either did not have a signed declaration with the vote envelope or the declaration had been included inside the vote envelope.
If we take the average daily vote return of 3, 000, that means in one day alone fully 20% of the ballots were spoiled. That is a horrendous number and may speak to problems with the voter awareness portion of this whole thing.
Beyond that, though, you may well have the complete disenfranchisement of thousands of voters simply because they didn't follow the rules. Maybe they were elderly and had trouble reading the information. Maybe they were illiterate. They still had a right to vote.
Then there is the possibility that thousands of other people voted twice or voted when they weren't entitled to vote.
This doesn't look like an election that is running swimmingly.
Nor are the ballots "flooding in" as VOCM claims.
Nope.
But then again, according to the city, that geyser on Temperance Street was proof that everything was working just fine in the city.
What, me worry?
