Student vote suppression can’t be rectified, but lessons will be learned for next time, says Elections NB
A Mount Allison student leader says she’s heard mostly negative feedback from students about participating in last Monday’s provincial election in Sackville.
Mount Allison Students’ Union VP Sydney Thorburn set up a survey last week asking students to share their experience voting. The survey asks when and where students voted, how satisfied they were with the experience, and includes space for students to give a detailed description of their experience, if they feel comfortable. Thorburn says the intention is to bring those testimonials from students directly to Elections NB.
“We don’t feel comfortable with ourselves if we let this go and don’t follow up with it,” says Thorburn. “Just so much unfortunate and outright bad things happened on Monday towards students—that suppressed the student vote—so that we feel the strong need to follow up with them.”
Thorburn says she hopes that future elections will see more training for staff at polling stations, especially training focussed on the rules as they apply to university students.
On Monday, dozens and possibly hundreds of students were either turned away or advised that they were breaking the law if they proceeded to vote.
The point of contention was the interpretation of the words “ordinarily resident in New Brunswick.”
The law requires that voters have been ordinarily resident in New Brunswick for at least the past 40 days to be eligible to vote. But “ordinarily resident” doesn’t mean a person hasn’t left New Brunswick at all within the past 40 days.
For returning students, the summer they spend working elsewhere does not affect their status as “ordinarily resident.” Similarly, a summer season spent at a cottage in Nova Scotia or PEI does not affect someone’s status as a resident of New Brunswick.
But several poll workers in Sackville on Monday could not be convinced that this was the correct interpretation of the rules, even after hearing it straight from the top.
Chief Electoral Officer Kim Poffenroth spoke with local returning officer Bill Hicks to explain the situation around 1:30pm on election day. But by around 5:30pm, there were still students walking out of the polling station saying they had been told they would be committing voter fraud if they voted.
Thorburn says that the students’ union is compiling information from students, and considering what approach they will take with Elections NB. She thinks an apology may be in order.
“Even just a form of an apology from Elections New Brunswick will speak volumes to the students that were affected,” says Thorburn. “My biggest fear was that students are going to be discouraged from voting in elections in the future.”
An apology could help turn around the negative experiences of many on election day, says Thorburn. She says she’s hoping some students will chalk up this first voting experience to an isolated incident, and even look back on it as a funny story and still be encouraged to vote again.
“Just how bad the experience was for them could kind of fire them up to do it again when they get the chance,” she says.
Elections NB spokesperson Paul Harpelle says that its a difficult situation for students seeking redress.
“Unfortunately, there’s no way of reversing this, or undoing what occurred at that particular polling location,” says Harpelle. He says that Elections NB has no idea how many students were effected, and also points out that students who didn’t manage to vote can’t get their vote back. “The election has passed,” he says, “so that can’t unfortunately be rectified.”
“In terms of what the workers did, which was applying the wrong interpretation of the ordinarily resident status,” says Harpelle, “those workers are now gone.”
But Elections NB will talk internally about what went wrong, he says.
“We do a post mortem or a debriefing after every election that we conduct,” says Harpelle. “So this is going to be a learning point that will be discussed. And as we get ready for the next election, obviously we recognize that we have to put more emphasis—especially when it is in locations where there’s a connection to the campuses—to make sure that the workers are properly trained and fully understand the distinction given to out-of-province students who are attending the post-secondary institutions in New Brunswick.”
In addition to poll workers giving misleading information, there was also a report of a Liberal party scrutineer, whom one student identified as local co-campaign manager Dylan Wooley-Berry, giving incorrect information and discouraging eligible students from voting.
Harpelle says from the Elections NB perspective, this is hearsay.
“It is not something that was brought specifically to our attention or that we witnessed ourselves,” says Harpelle. “And so, if this did occur, that’s rather unfortunate, because it is not legal to interfere with the voting process. But again, we can’t take any kind of action based on hearsay.”
Harpelle says that a complaint of this nature would have to be made with the local police, from a voter who felt that someone had interfered or in some way caused them to feel like they that they were not eligible to vote.
Thorburn says it’s unlikely she will make a police complaint about the scrutineer who told her to stop encouraging students to vote.
“I don’t even think we need to go that route,” she says. “There were just so many other wrongful things done to suppress the student vote in Sackville, kind of at the hands of Elections New Brunswick.”
She says she’d rather focus on issues that can be prevented in the future within Elections New Brunswick.
Paul Harpelle says that there’s a couple of things that may make a difference next time around.
First, the fixed dates for provincial elections may soon be moved to October. Depending on how late in October that date is set, the debate over 40-day ‘ordinary residency’ may be moot, and even first year students may find themselves eligible to vote.
And second, Harpelle says that on-campus voting can make a difference.
Elections NB ran on-campus polling stations at Mount Allison for the last two elections, says Harpelle. “We often tried to employ students at those locations, and I think there was more emphasis placed on the training side of things, on the eligibility requirements related to students.
“So they would have been more aware of the fact that yes, a student can use a document provided by the campus saying that this individual lives in residence, at this address.
And I think there was a shortcoming on our and when the training was done for this particular election. I’m convinced that they didn’t get enough background and training on how to handle the the students that were going to be voting in Sackville.”
Harpelle says Elections NB didn’t hear about similar problems in other university towns this year, though they did hear disappointment at the lack of on campus voting.
He says he’s not sure whether or not the issues in Sackville will make it into Elections NB report for this election, but he says all feedback is taken into consideration, regardless of whether it makes the final report.
“We haven’t shied away from accepting feedback,” says Harpelle. People can email info@electionsnb.ca to get their feedback on file, he says.
“We want to improve after every election. And so that’s part of the debriefing. We will look at things that were challenges in this election that we want to make sure don’t repeat in the next.”
The next time Sackvillians head to the polls will likely be for municipal elections slated to happen on or before May 10, 2021.
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