I can understand logistical difficulties and delays, but if you give people a day and hours to vote you absolutely have to give your best to meet those hours. Fly people out to the area and stay until the job is done. Leaving early as mentioned here is shameful:
When word spread that the voting station was closing at 2.30 p.m., she and others rushed to the polling booth, but she was too late.
“I could hear their airplane starting in the background,” she said. "Today, I lost my legal right to vote.
And I don’t even know what to say about not setting up at all, if true:
In Ivujivik, Mayor Adamie Kalingo said Elections Canada staff didn’t even set up a station in his community before they left.
…
They eventually did around midday, but after a toilet stop, they took off again.
Having advanced days and mail-in voting is all well and good, but you can’t tell people that X day is election day and then have no method for them to vote.
Unforeseen severe weather conditions seems like a legit reason to close, but it seems like provisions should be made for this circumstance so that ballots can be verified and tallied later.
Just… closing with no recourse seems super bad.
If I travelled somewhere for work, and a storm rolled in. I wouldn’t expect to leave work early. I’d expect work to put me up in a hotel while the storm passed.
I’m happy to be proven wrong but I don’t believe there are provisions for delaying just some polling stations in our current electoral system. So just wait for the storm to pass would be functionally the same as what happened here.
I haven’t read the details just the faq, it seems like the provisions for delay are at the level of entire ridings.
However I believe this experience proves we have work to do ensuring that outlying areas can participate in our democracy properly.
The article mentions that the weather was affecting flights home for workers, not affecting the ability to vote. In this case, there’s no need to delay the vote. The workers could’ve kept working and should’ve been offered accommodations due to a delayed flight home.
Waiting for the storm to pass would’ve included polling stations opening, remaining opening until voting closed, and accommodating workers who wouldn’t have been able to leave on a plane as scheduled. Denying Canadians the ability to vote on election day so that the workers could ensure they made it home as scheduled to not be inconvenienced is unacceptable.
Edit: I was partially wrong, accessing locations was part of the article: “In several cases, it was not possible to recruit local teams. In other cases, harsh weather conditions have prevented access to communities.”
*Barred from their legal right to vote.
Sadly not surprising at all
Colonial government continues to not give a fuck about indigenous rights
This is pretty crazy, but where are the volunteers? If people care so much then why aren’t they offering to work at the polls?
Elections Canada is responsible for recruiting, organizing, and training volunteers, aren’t they?
Assuming so, they should know where there are staffing shoftfalls and address them accordingly.
Our democracy is already under threat and not particularly robust in terms of representation. It is absolutely critical to keep people from being further disenfranchised.
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Hindering how?
