St. John's city clerk Neil Martin continues to follow the fashion and is blaming Ottawa (Elections Canada) for some of the problems turning up with the city's electoral system.
martin shouldn't bear personal responsibility for this. His problem is compounded by having a mayor and council who either have no idea how elections are run, don't care how to run them properly, or don't want them run properly. There's no other excuse for the fiasco that's unfolding.
Stories continue to float to the surface of ballots mailed to people who don't even live in the country anymore. In addition to the stuff on VOCM in the past 24 hours, I have collected stories of another eight ballots sent out erroneously to people who don't love at the addresses on the list or who don't even live in the city anymore.
Some of the people have been out of town for more than eight years.
Is it Elections Canada's fault?
Nope.
EC estimates that the voter list varies by about 17% each year. That comprises 13% due to address changes, two percent from people reaching voting age, one percent who died and another one percent who are new immigrants.
EC updates its voter list using federal, provincial and municipal databases. Obviously, the City of St. John's has some problems with its own databases. Either that or they got stuck with an old voters list.
In the worst case scenario, the current city election is being run with a list that out of whack by about 17%. That supposes there was no effort made to correct the federal list or that whatever city officials did was ineffective - like not being able to search and find that there was a guy named Gus and a guy named Augustus living at the same address in Ward Five.
City Hall claims there are approximately 79, 000 eligible voters in St. John's this year. We don't know if that represents the likely variance in the list (accounting for the dead and new voters) or if it just is a wild guess. There should be about 2,400 new voters, taking into account the number of deaths.
Taken altogether, we can reasonably conclude that the city voting list is out of whack by about 10%, give or take a percentage point or two. That puts about 8,000 ballots in play that will be sent to people at the wrong address, people who no longer live in the city or people who are dead.
In some races in the city, only a fraction of those 8, 000 potentially fraudulent ballots will be enough to tip the election in favour of one candidate over another.
Stand by for the legal challenges.
