City staff issued a report and an apology over the election

MERRITT – Amid some controversy over the November municipal election, Merritt City staff has put out a report and an apology.

“While the results are solid, we want to say sorry for any short comings that we had in the process,” said Chief Administrative Officer, Sean Smith.

Smith said after a review, they found three different contraventions of the Local Government Act (LGA) and seven other areas that were not necessarily against the LGA, but could have been improved.

“There were three different instances we found where there was none compliance with the requirements for elections in the Local Government Act and we take that really seriously,” said Smith. “We apologize to electors for those short comings and acknowledge each one and have a plan in place to make sure these are addressed in future elections. We do specifically note that these didn’t have any material impacts on the results of the election but, with that being said, they can impact voter confidence and we want people, when they show up to the ballot, to feel very confident that this process is being administered exactly how someone would expect.”

The three contraventions were:

• Appointment of election officials
  • LGA requires both a Chief Election Officer and a Deputy Chief Election Officer to be appointed
    • The City did not appoint a Deputy Chief Election Officer until four days before General Election day, six days after the first advanced voting day took place
• Registration of electors – recording the nature of identification documents (ID)
  • LGA requires election officials registering electors to note on the application what type of ID was used
    • The City’s ballot books did not include a line for officials to mark what kind of ID was shown
• Candidates present at the voting place
  • LGA states “other than for the purpose of voting, a candidate must not be present at a voting place or special voting opportunity while voting proceedings are being conducted”
    • The City said while candidates waited for the chambers to be opened up, a number of them gathered within the voting place
      • However, there is no indication that the candidates interacted with voters or the ballot box in anyway.

The other areas for change or improvement the City recognized was:

• Serial numbers on the ballot
• Machine vs. hand count
• Identification of election officials
• Suitability of the ballot box
• Type of paper used for ballots
• Best practice resources
• Failure to identify insufficient capacity

The City conducted this review internally instead of bringing someone in for the reasons of saving money but,  more importantly, to take accountability.

“We knew and we saw that there was some errors,” said Smith. “It’s really good to own your own mistakes, so we wanted the opportunity to do that. You can have an external person come in and run a review and tell you that you messed up, but when you know you made some errors, let’s just own it and I think that’s what people expect their government to do and that’s what we feel we have done with this report.”

Former City councilor and Mayoral candidate, Tony Luck, was originally challenging the election process, stating most of what came out of this report as reasons why. Since City staff released the report, Luck has told Q101 they are in the process of withdrawing the challenge.

“The report was okay we weren’t overly ecstatic about it, I think it was supposed to be a review but there seemed to be a lot of opinions in there and we don’t necessarily agree with the opinions,” said Luck. “I think for the most part it’s what we tried to accomplish, bring the light to the problem. I know there is a lot of people who threw me under the bus for it but you know our team is also getting a lot of comments about ‘Thank you Tony for doing what you did because it was a gong show’, so we are quite happy about the people who realized there was issues there and I think having the report brought forward was really good.”

Luck said from the start his intentions were just to raise attention to the issues and not have a re-election.

“We never wanted to go back to an election, never once did we want to do that and we made that really clear, but of course when you have to use the language which is in the Local Government Act and go to court and those kind of things. What we had to do is come to realization, if we go to court the judge might just rule for a new election and we didn’t want. I think if they [the City] were being honest they would recognize that there was some major issues there.”