Polls closed for the 2013 municipal election at 8 p.m. on Oct. 21, but in the Town of Westlock, it took until 12:35 a.m. on Oct. 22 for the final vote count to be announced.
Town returning officer Carol Revega explained various procedures need to be followed when counting the votes cast, and those can take time, especially if something goes wrong.
One of the factors that led to the final vote counts not getting released until more than four hours after the polls closed was the fact the counters had to count the ballots cast not only at the seven polling stations at the Westlock and District Community Hall, but also the eight advanced polls and institutional polls.
In total, there were 15 different polling stations set up during the election, and each station had four different boxes into which votes were cast, Revega said, meaning 60 boxes needed to be emptied and their contents counted.
The first set of votes counted were those for mayor, followed by town council and the two school boards.
Throwing a small wrench into the works was the fact a single vote for mayor went missing, and it wasn’t found until the school board votes were being counted. Although that one vote had no effect on the final result, Revega said it was imperative it be found.
“As returning officer, I have to ensure the integrity of the election,” she said. “In order to ensure that, I have to ensure each of the polling stations balances at the end of the evening.”
Revega explained that meant each polling station had to account for every ballot it had when the polls opened. In other words, the sum of the unused, valid, spoiled and rejected ballots had to be the same number as the number of ballots the station started with.
If not, every effort must be made to find the missing ballot or ballots.
“We do not leave until we find that ballot, and that ballot happened to be in one of the school ballot boxes,” Revega said.
Another delay, she said, was how the election is structured, with 13 people running for six positions, and voters having to select up to six names on their ballot.
“It’s not like the mayor, where you can divide them up into piles of candidate ‘A,’ candidate ‘B,’ candidate ‘C’ and quickly flip through them,” Revega said. “This was reading off each candidate’s mark and marking it and then going through the next ballot and doing the same thing for up to six marks on a ballot.”
Fortunately, she said, if a polling station is done one set of ballots before the others, it can move on to the next set; each round doesn’t need to be completed before the next round starts.
In attendance to count all the ballots were 22 counters, Revega said, some of whom had worked the institutional polling stations, and others whom had been called in to help.
