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November 29, 2006 Is your municipal ballot less important than your federal or provincial one? Consider what it represents: Federal and Provincial taxes are based on income; if you have no income, you pay no tax. Municipalities tax your property ... and confiscate it if taxes are not paid. Property owners are taxed, regardless of their income. Rising assessments mean that many people on fixed incomes may lose their homes if they can’t afford the taxes. Yet your only input to the system, your municipal ballot, is treated with less respect than a lottery ticket. Many municipalities in Ontario used mail-in ballots in the recent municipal election. Some also offered phone and internet voting capabilities. Bureaucrats encourage municipal Councils to abandon the traditional polling booth in favour of these “progressive” changes, citing benefits of improved voter turnout, easier accessibility for seasonal residents or the handicapped, or lower costs. Noble intentions, but as is often the case, the actual result is quite the opposite. Voters have lost their right to a secret ballot. Many have lost their right to vote at all. Security is so lax that the entire voting process has lost credibility. The first major problem is the voters list. While Federal and Provincial voters lists are traditionally based on door-to-door enumeration, the Municipal voters list is compiled from data from MPAC (Municipal Property Assessment Corporation). Yes, that is the same organization that was roundly condemned by the Auditor General, and whose assessments are currently frozen by the Province of Ontario pending further investigations. MPAC gets their data from enumeration forms mailed to property owners, for which they have said there is a 40% return rate. So, to begin with, the data is 60% incomplete, as well as being out of date. It is also incorrect. Many names are missing (including at least one current Councillor in our municipality!), and many are duplicated. Federal and Provincial voting is based on residence: you get only one vote, which is cast in the riding where you live. Municipal voting is based on residence and property ownership. You can have multiple votes, one in each municipality in which you own property. But, if you have multiple properties in one municipality, you are entitled to only one vote. Thus the MPAC data must be corrected to eliminate all the duplicate entries for owners of multiple properties. This is a huge, if not impossible task. The names are unlikely to be identical: John Smith may own several properties, as J. Smith, John Q. Smith, and J.Q. Smith. He may also have a son, John Smith, living at the same address. If staff can’t be sure, they will err on the side of caution, and leave all names on the voters list. Then of course, there are all the dead folk who still appear on the voters list. Your executors are unlikely to notify MPAC of your demise. If anyone else does, they are asked to provide a death certificate. Needless to say, this discourages any attempt to clean up the voters list, and the number of dead “voters” continues to rise. So, when bureaucrats brag that mail-in voting has increased voter turnout, consider who those voters are... “100% voter turnout” would mean either a lot of voter fraud, or an emptying of the cemeteries! As I said earlier, the voters list is only the first problem. In a traditional election, with walk-in voting booths, the voters list wouldn’t be quite such a problem. Scrutineers can monitor the process. People with multiple ballots can’t vote multiple times: someone would notice. Dead people can’t walk into a polling booth (surely, someone would notice!) In a mail-in election, there are no such safeguards. Certainly, there is a fine for voter fraud, but how can it be enforced? Voters sign a declaration card, but there is no “signature card” to compare it to. If there is no way of telling if multiple ballots went to one person, there is no way to prevent them being used. Scrutineers are allowed to witness the ballot-opening and counting, but are powerless, having no means of verifying the ballots counted or rejected. And what about security? Under the Elections Act, which governs Federal and Provincial elections, it is a criminal offence to remove your ballot from the voting booth. (A local protester in my riding has been convicted for doing just that.) Under the Municipal Elections Act it’s perfectly OK to just toss all the ballots in the mail. So, all those ballots for voters who have moved, or died, are being delivered... to someone. Even if the ballots are sent to the proper address, there is no guarantee that the voter actually receives his ballot. What is to prevent one spouse using the other’s ballot, parents voting for their offspring, or vice versa? I remember an elderly lady who came to vote in the last federal election. Her daughter helped her walk to the polling booth, and offered to also help her vote. “No thank you dear,” said the mother firmly, “I’m quite able to do this myself”. I wonder if that lady even saw her own municipal ballot. If she did receive it and fill it in, what are the chances her ballot was actually counted? In the mail-in election in Peterborough, almost 25% of ballots cast were rejected because they were “incorrectly completed”: eg. the declaration card was not signed, not included, or put in the “secrecy” envelope. This means almost one quarter of voters were disenfranchised. For the next municipal election, let’s demand a return to good old-fashioned polling booths and door-to-door enumeration. We can accommodate seasonal residents or handicapped voters in the same way that Federal and Provincial elections do: with advance polls, ballot templates for the sight impaired, polling booths in seniors residences. Mail-in ballots may be more convenient, but surely democracy is worth a bit of inconvenience. -- Anne Panter -- |
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