Incidents of voter suppression and interference in Sackville on election day have been deemed serious enough to warrant an investigation by Elections New Brunswick.
Over the Thanksgiving weekend, Mount Allison Student Union president Jon Ferguson sent out an email informing students that Elections New Brunswick has hired an independent investigator to look into what happened on election day in September.
As CHMA reported in the week following the election, many students reported being turned away repeatedly from the Sackville polling station, and were misinformed about their right to vote by Elections NB poll workers.
It turns out some incidents may have been worse.
Erica Butler spoke with Jon Ferguson to find out more about the Elections NB investigation:
In the week after of the election, spokesperson Paul Harpelle told CHMA it was a difficult situation for students seeking redress, because the election has passed. But he said Elections NB would consider Sackville polling problems in their election debriefing, and would make changes that would prevent the same thing happening in future.
For their part, Ferguson and MASU Vice President Sydney Thorburn were calling for an apology from Elections NB. The New Brunswick Student Alliance also got involved, and called for an investigation into Sackville voter suppression issues as well as other problems they identified in a report at the end of September.
Around the time of the NBSA report, Ferguson and Thorburn had a phone conversation with Chief Electoral Office Kim Poffenroth and spokesperson Paul Harpelle.
“We communicated again what had happened on election day,” says Ferguson. “And I think it became clear that there was potentially a little bit of a breakdown in communication after the fact about what really happened.”
“When myself and Vice President Thorburn were talking to them, and really going through every example of what students faced, I think it began to dawn on them that they only had part of the information,” says Ferguson.
Some of the stories Ferguson and Thorburn relayed to Elections NB were even more serious than those previously reported by CHMA.
“Some included the student having their ballot ripped up in front of them,” says Ferguson. “Some students, and not just students, but multiple voters who weren’t students, indicated that they thought their ballots were being peeked at.”
“Probably the biggest thing is the fact that students were asked if they were students when they were entering,” says Ferguson. “And that’s, you know, completely unacceptable. And just strange, really.”
Ferguson is taking names of students interesting in speaking with the investigator who will be in Sackville to conduct in-person interviews this Friday and Saturday, October 16 and 17, 2020.
Paul Harpelle confirmed via email that Elections NB has “engaged an independent investigator to take a closer look at what happened during the recent election impacting students in Sackville.”
Harpelle said Elections NB does not want to jeopardize the findings by commenting further, but will be more than willing to discuss the issue after seeing the final report of the investigator.
