Friday May 16, 2025 | NATIONAL NEWS ANALYSIS [from VICTORIA, BC]
by Mary P Brooke | Island Social Trends
This editorial analysis is not intended to challenge or question the overall final results of the recent Canadian federal election, though in some ridings the results may still be questionable.
Meanwhile, several areas of Elections Canada process or require review in order to maintain the confidence of not just voters but the broader community and business sectors.
What each of these scenarios indicates is a decision made by Elections Canada at some level, and/or a lack of oversight of workers, voting places and consultants, and a lack of responsiveness to problems that arise if not actual failure to perform adequately.
And the government of Canada should want Elections Canada to do their best, for all sorts of reasons outlined below.
Voters don’t need to be pampered, they need to be satisfied.
Let’s go through a number of suggestions one by one… at least eight areas for improvement are expounded below.
Mail-in Ballots:
Elections Canada says that their Special Ballot process — largely by postal mail — was used “to respond to an increased demand for voting services that meet the diverse needs of electors”.
Therein lies an almost naive confidence and reliance in Canada Post which for years — and in particular since the November/December 2024 postal strike — has not been reliable in many instances (e.g. several instances of parcels and letters arriving late or not at all since the ‘resumption’ of postal services in mid December.
The threshold of relying upon the Canada Post system includes expecting that a posted letter get to a mailbox, will that mailbox be cleared on schedule, will deliver trucks be available for delivery to Elections Canada within deadline,etc.
And below that threshold of delivery was the assumption that the Elections Canada return address would be printed properly by a printer somewhere; where was the proofing or audit for that in the case in Terrebonne where the postal code was wrong?
Is it so important to provide ‘mail from anywhere’ convenience in order to capture every vote? Perhaps there is still an onus on voters to get to a voting place (including the ample opportunity for advance voting).
Ballot boxes at EDOs:
In the past few elections it has become known that ballot boxes containing completed early ‘special ballots’ are held at Electoral District Offices (EDOs) for weeks. They contain ballots completed by electors for several weeks until the boxes are shipped to the designated ballot counting location in time for election night.
What sort of security assures no tampering with the boxes which includes forgetting where they are or otherwise go missing?
Providing the ‘early’ opportunity to vote by Special Ballot at EDOs, (from shortly after the Writ drops to about six days ahead of election day) seems like bending too far backwards to accommodate the convenience and eagerness of some voters. Again, wait until the Advance Voting days (which have increased in number over the past two elections and could be extended to even more days in a future election).
This is not a criticism of EDO staff who are sworn to do their best. It is a presumptive failure of process which goes too far in that many things can go wrong … including that boxes can be damaged or go missing.
Slick digital advertising:
The consultants who were hired to manage the advertising delivery for Elections Canada decided that all their digital advertising would be done with the ‘programmatic’ process. That’s where content and format can be sent from the client (Election Canada) directly into the digital platform of the advertiser.
In many cases, those advertisers are newspaper or news service platforms. Some communities are well served by smaller newspapers (digital or print) and where those publications were not set up for programmatic ad placement their communities were neglected for Elections Canada advertising (e.g. when and where to vote) in the pages that they read for their news.
Elections Canada could have provided ad files in jpeg format like other agencies do for elections at other levels. For their convenience they chose to deliberately cut out some smaller news outlets from their get-out-the-vote process.
This also discriminated against smaller news outlets who do reach their communities and can dearly use the revenue and credibility that comes from ads placed like agencies such as Elections Canada.
At a stretch that advertising placement decision could also be said to be influencing the vote by favouring only the large volume of readers who visit large digital platforms. Going with the persuasion that ‘more is better’ runs counter to wanting to reach every possible voter with as many opportunities as possible.
Consultants:
Is the Canadian public aware that advertising agencies and marketing consultants are engaged by Elections Canada to make decisions about how electors/voters receive information about voting?
At the very least, the decision-making for what these agencies and consultants do should be guided by tougher centralized decisions by Elections Canada. If Elections Canada is unfamiliar with current digital practices in advertising and marketing then it falls on their shoulders to be brought up to speed.
Advance voting days:
For this most recent federal election (the 45th general election held April 28, 2025) there were four advance voting days. That they fell on the Easter long weekend (April 18 to 21). The convenience of the long weekend was probably helpful for busy working people and families. But the lineups were notoriously long… there was much media coverage all weekend about people waiting a long time in line sometimes up to 90 minutes to cast their ballot.
The long lineups were an impediment to this overall idea that Elections Canada wants to make voting as accessible as possible.
Things to fix the advance voting issues would include:
- Offer advance voting on more days (possibly five to seven days),
- Train more staff so that they can be on two shifts. For staff the days were incredibly long for 12 hours of voting, not to mention staff getting there early and leaving late.
- Don’t offer the full voting period on a long weekend. Stagger the days so that some days are in a regular work week.
Location of voting places:
The decisions about voting place locations seems to be using old lists and/or does not account for finding a location that is easily reached by everyone — including people without vehicles.
There needs to be a review of voting locations so that voting places are reachable by all potential voters.
Having different voting locations for Advance vs General voting is confusing for many voters. Here in BC some voters though they could vote at any polling station (as is the case for BC provincial elections, where scanned ballot cards can be easily redirected to the appropriate final electoral district office or tabulation process).
Scanning ballot cards:
From the contacts Island Social Trends made on the matter of not having ballot scanners for the federal election, we were told that was considered to have security issues.
We respectfully suggest that the manner in which paper ballots scattered across electoral districts and coming in by mail (sometimes imperfectly or not at all) is less secure or reliable than the scanning of ballots.
If digital scanning of ballots is good enough for municipal and provincial elections it should be good enough for federal. This is another example of where the federal-level decision makers are perhaps less in touch with how people live their lives and expect their elections to be run.
Long operational days:
The completely natural expectation of fatigue for election workers should not be an acceptable norm in the Elections Canada process at voting places.
If there is a security reason to have the same worker for the whole day, certainly provide breaks (that may already be the case). But it would be a more suitable management decision to have more workers doing fewer hours.
Exhausted voting place workers will lead to errors no matter how well-intentioned the workers are. Not only are they processing critical detail but they are expected to provide friendly customer service at the same time.That’s asking a lot of people who are trained for only a few days of work and in many cases are entirely new to the work and the process.
Election night and days that follow:
It used to be that election night was a horse race to the finish line within hours or at least on the same night.
Now with the range of special ways to vote, the results can take longer. It’s not so much the delay in final results that is the problem here but that the end result can get a bit messy.
In the case of this recent federal election the dispute over the number of ballots which also included potentially disputed ballots due to mail-in problems has held many Canadians in suspense about whether or not they have a majority Liberal government or a minority that acts like a majority because it is ‘so close to enough’.
Maintaining voter confidence:
Maintaining voter confidence should be Elections Canada’s top priority, trumping even the extensive convenience that Elections Canada tried to provide.
Provide the convenience through scanned ballots. That speeds up the time in line during Advance and General voting days. Most people are completely comfortable with digital processes nowadays and will expect that level of service — both accuracy of the scanners and a short time in line (no more re-folding of ballots which takes time in addition to everything else already mentioned).
Scanned ballot results will be counted much faster, with election results known (including Advance ballots) within an hour or two. The relatively few mail-in or special ballots will be less likely to tip a vote result if more people show up to use a more efficient modern system on election day.
Using ballot scanners would reduce the personnel requirement — both at the voting places and the consultants who are hired to explain a presently very complex voting process. It would also eliminate paper-ballot boxes going missing or risking damage in transport (e.g. from on-campus voting locations to the central EDO in each riding).
If Canadians lose confidence in their election system then we would start sliding down that slippery slope of questioning the results of our elections. No one wants to go there.
===== RELATED:
- Single vote wins another seat for the Liberals (May 12, 2025)
- Election 2025 aftermath: Canadians got what they wanted and needed (May 1, 2025)
- Election 2025: Special & advance ballots delayed final results (April 29, 2025)
- Federal Election 2025 Results – leaders, parties & BC (April 28, 2025 / updated to May 9, 2025)
- Record turnout for 2025 federal Advance Voting (April 23, 2025)
- NEWS SECTIONS: CANADIAN FEDERAL ELECTION 2025 | POLITICS | 45th PARLIAMENT | DIGITAL TECH