Élections Montréal says no anomalies were found or way to examine the rejected ballots

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Élections Montréal has closed the chapter on this year’s municipal elections with a finding that there were no anomalies in the counting of votes, but with a call for a “modernization of the electoral process.”

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The electoral office said in a press release that it “wishes to limit all kinds of errors during the electoral process.”

“Manually counting large numbers of votes in just a few hours and by hundreds of teams is a complex operation unparalleled in other parts of the country,” said Élections Montréal, which is staffed by the city clerk’s office. .

“In a context of labor shortages and considering a certain demand for voting by correspondence, a greater use of technology seems to be necessary.”

The election office did not offer comment on the Montreal Gazette’s finding in the days after the election that tellers at two polling stations at the same polling place in the Pointe-aux-Trembles district had rejected 73% and 64%. , 5% of the ballots cast for mayor of Montreal, or that dozens of polling stations across the island had rejection rates close to 10 percent or more in the mayoral vote count.

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The Gazette made the discoveries by examining the detailed polling place voting results that Élections Montréal made available through open data. The average rejection rate citywide was around two percent.

When Mathilde St-Vincent, a spokesperson for Élections Montréal, was asked to comment on the high rates of rejection of ballots, she said that Quebec’s electoral law does not allow Élections Montréal to reopen the polls to verify whether the ballots were legitimately rejected or to verify whether the ballots were counted correctly.

The law requires that the ballot boxes be sealed once the votes are counted and the teller, also known as the deputy counting officer, fills out a “declaration of vote” form by hand. The election official has to account for all the ballots received in that vote in the declaration of the vote.

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“The law stipulates that only a request for a recount, duly accepted by a judge, can lead to the reopening of the polls,” St-Vincent said. The law establishes a period of four days after the election results are published to request a recount. “Therefore, it is not possible to open a ballot box to revalidate the data in parts.”

In Montreal, six recounts were requested and granted by a judge. All initially declared winners were confirmed by the counts.

In addition to high vote rejection rates at certain polling stations, the Gazette examination found that 35 of the 79 votes cast by mail for mayor of Montreal in the Côte-des-Neiges district were credited to independent candidate Beverly. Bernardo of the Communist League, while former mayor Denis Coderre scored zero. Valérie Plante, who won the election, received 37 mail-in ballots in the district, while the remaining seven ballots went to third-placed Balarama Holness.

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St-Vincent said his office examined all the anomalies raised by the Gazette examination and found that the vote counts and the number of rejected ballots that the tellers filled out on their “declaration of vote” forms matched the numbers that were entered. and uploaded to open data. In other words, there were no data entry errors, he said. That’s all that can be said about it because the elections office cannot reopen the polls to examine the ballots, he said.

Élections Montréal also confirmed that the results of the vote uploaded to open data counted 599 rejected votes in the race for mayor of Côte-des-Neiges, Notre-Dame-de-Grâce, the same number that it had reported in its electoral results. officers on November 9. Examining the Montreal Gazette found 528 rejected ballots, or 71 fewer rejected ballots, after filtering the data uploaded by the elections office by district and race. However, The Gazette later reported that certain polling stations were missing from the leaked results. No one else reported such a flaw using the open data results, Élections Montréal said Tuesday, after showing it was able to reach 599 rejected ballots by filtering the results.

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The race for mayor of Côte-des-Neiges – Notre-Dame-de-Grâce was the subject of a judicial recount, which adjusted the number of rejected ballots up to 653.

Élections Montréal said it recruited 12,500 people to work on the elections and had 3,500 teams of staff who counted the ballots by hand on election night.

Montreal tried electronic voting in a provincial pilot project in 2005. However, failures in the electronic system led to errors and forced election officials to extend voting hours at some polling stations. The province’s auditor general recommended that Quebec abandon electronic voting systems in municipal elections after examining the debacle.

St-Vincent said technology has evolved since 2005 and it’s time to take another look at electronic voting.

With voter turnout at 38.3 percent in the last Montreal election, he added, “we must start to see what actions we can take before the next election (in 2025), always with the ultimate goal of increasing turnout. “.

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