Monday October 21, 2019 ~ COLWOOD / SOOKE
~ Mary P Brooke ~ West Shore Voice News
It’s been raining non-stop in the Esquimalt-Saanich-Sooke riding today where people have nevertheless come out in droves to vote in the 43rd federal election.
People have seemed intent and determined to vote this time, compared to a more relaxed feeling in the 2011 and 2015 federal elections.
If anyone approaches a polling station and gets through the door ahead of 7 pm, they can still vote, even if the times gets past 7 pm due to lineups.
Today at the voting station in the SEAPARC Leisure Complex, an enlarged version of the ballot was posted up on the door which was helpful for people to view ahead of voting.
At one point, a group of local students arrived en masse with their teachers and parent helpers at the SEAPARC location to watch voting in progress, even though likely none of them were old enough to vote. They had walked to the rec centre location in the rain, and were soaking wet, but all of them seemed keen for what they would learn on this field trip.
For voting at the Sooke Community Hall location today, voters needed to negotiate a long flight of outdoor stairs to get into the second-floor main hall. The aging elevator had an attendant to help people operate it, if they required use of the elevator for mobility reasons.
At the voting station within the Juan de Fuca Rec Center in Colwood, the upstairs room was spacious and bright. Most voters came to the front door of the rec center which required a long walk through the facility past the rink and to the back of the building. But the elevator ride was quick.
Campaign signage was still up around town in all areas of the west shore today including Langford, Colwood and Sooke. In fact, a flurry of smaller signs seems to have popped up overnight, creating a visual blast for motorists, cyclists and pedestrians to see around the communities today.
For polling station workers it’s a long day. The voting stations are open for 12 hours today (7 am to 7 pm), which means getting up early, and staying up quite late in order to see that votes are counted and reported (including the Advance Poll ballots), and then packing up the stations. All the polling stations seem to have been running smoothly under the oversight of positive-minded supervisors.
We’ll start posting local results after the counts roll in, as well as interviews with several of the local candidates. Check for that later tonight on this website.